The Liberty Daily 
(Mises Institute)—Garrett Langley is the CEO of Flock Safety, and he wants a whole lot of your tax money. Although he claims to be a CEO of a private business, it’s not actually private in any meaningful sense. Flock has essentially one kind of customer: government agencies. Flock Safety, of course, is the company that’s been putting up most of those ALPR (Automated License Plate Readers) cameras across the United States. There are now at least 120,000 of them. They are funded by tax dollars.
Langley presents himself as a private businessman, an entrepreneur, and as someone who provides a service to the community. But the term that best describes Langley is something like “parasite” or “plutocrat” or “welfare queen” because his “business model” is simply finding ways to exploit the taxpayers through government contracts.
A real entrepreneur is someone who finds ways to bring products and services to the marketplace where participants voluntarily buy and sell goods and services. The key word here is “voluntary.” With Flock cameras, there is nothing voluntary about the buying and selling because the people who pay for the cameras are not doing so voluntarily. Nor are they the people making the purchase. Rather, when Flock sells its services, the transaction is one in which Flock sells to a government agency, and then then government hands over taxpayer dollars to Flock.
Langley is just the latest in a long line of ersatz entrepreneurs who make money by using governments as middlemen in a scheme to rob the taxpayers of their hard-earned income. In this, they are no different from a recipient of a government bailout or taxpayer subsidized favors. These “businessmen” little more than lobbyists for government largesse.
The recipients of these contracts will claim that they provide valuable goods and services. Yet, it is impossible to say whether or not these allegedly valuable services are worth anything close to what the taxpayers are forced to pay for them. After all, if these services are so valuable, why does no private market exist for them? For instance, the politicians of Knox County, Tennessee have spent $2 million on Flock cameras and related costs. Would the taxpayers of the county voluntarily pay that kind of money—to be spied on—if they had the choice? Many locals suspected the answer would be “no,” which is why the Knox county sheriff secretly conspired to spend the money without informing the public. The Garrett Langleys of the world would have us believe this counts as “entrepreneurship” and private-sector commerce.
Indeed, a great many tech “founders” and CEOs are essentially adjuncts of the state and rely heavily on government contracts. Elon Musk’s career is based largely on subsidized loans and government contracts for his “private” federally subsidized company, SpaceX. Palantir, the surveillance company founded by “libertarian” Peter Thiel has long been a “partner” to government spy agencies. And then, of course, there are the defense contractors like Erik Prince who founded a company of taxpayer-funded mercenaries—many of whom turned out to be war criminals. Taxpayers paid for it all.
Often, the partnership between government and faux private companies provides a means of getting around restrictions on government powers. For instance, Dominion Voting Systems—a company that is almost totally taxpayer-funded—has sued its detractors for defamation. Were Dominion a government agency—which, for all intents and purposes, it is—it would not be able to sue for defamation. Yet, because it is nominally “private,” it can sue private taxpayers who are also forced to pay for Dominion’s “services.”
Perhaps the most insidious part of these partnerships between the regime and private companies is the way that government agencies use the private companies to do an end run around the Fourth Amendment. This has been well established in case law in recent decades, and it is now common for government agencies to use private companies to access information about individuals. This information would have required a warrant were the government to obtain it directly, but using private companies as middlemen allows for what are effectively warrantless searches. Nominally private companies like Flock provide an essential tool in helping governments violate the Bill of Rights. As explained by a 2023 article in the Yale Law and Policy Review:
Rather than obtain a warrant to compel private actors to hand over … sensitive geolocation information … the government now simply purchases mass records from third-party brokers—without a warrant. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alone has spent millions of dollars buying CSLI data from two data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street, since 2017.The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) have purchased services and data from Venntel, a broker whose parent company claims to have access to location data on over 150 million devices.The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has also confirmed that it avails itself of third-party brokers’ data. Even local police have purchased sensitive location data from brokers to support law enforcement investigations.
Moreover, when governments use contractors to carry out the edicts of government agencies, they are better able to obfuscate the details of how the money is actually spent. Government contracting is now a major source of government spending, and there are more taxpayer funded contractors than there are federal “civil servants.” From local governments to the feds, government is being outsourced to the “private” sector, but it’s only getting bigger, more expensive, and more powerful.
Anyone who has tried to get a handle on government spending, and where it all goes, can attest to the fact that government contracting makes it far more difficult to track what exactly taxpayer dollars are used for. Whereas data on government agencies’ budgets and activities is relatively easy to find in government documentation, the contracting process adds another layer under which information is often well hidden or, at least, far more laborious to collect and compile. Spending related to what politicians often dubiously call “national security,” of course, is well hidden. The end result is that information about government spending is effectively laundered through the nominally private companies that receive the tax dollars in question. These private companies will even invoke “private property rights” as an excuse to not reveal how they are using taxpayer funds.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In practice, if a “private” company receives a substantial amount of tax dollars, it should be treated as a de facto government agency, and with all the public disclosure requirements that come with it. In Colorado, for instance, we have the “Colorado Open Records Act,” through which any member of the public can obtain data on most government agencies’ communications, spending, and programs. This includes texts from emails, and internal documentation. The salaries of government employees are also matters of public record. Most states have similar programs, and the US government has the Freedom of Information act—although the FOIA is continually weakened by the growth of federal secrecy in recent decades.
The same “open records” requirements should be true of any “private” company which receives, say, more than ten percent of its revenues from taxpayers. A company like Flock, which is almost totally taxpayer-funded should essentially be an open book in terms of its records, activities, and owners. Every email, every document, every communication should be subject to open-records requests in a way similar to state governments. And every employee’s salary should be posted online. If taxpayer-funded companies and employees don’t like that, they can stop taking taxpayer money. After all, the taxpayers are footing the bill. They should be able to see who benefits from all that taxpayer money pouring into Flock and companies like it. If a company is going to parasitically live off taxpayer funds, the taxpayers ought to have a right to see where every dime goes.
The fact that this information is supposedly “private” illustrates how the faux private status of the company is an essential part of the government’s strategy. The point is to use private companies to enhance government secrecy and power. Tax-funded “entrepreneurs” like Langley are more than happy to get rich on taxpayer money in the process.
