One thousand upvotes. The criminalization of everyday life (of which licensing/regulation/registration/TSA searches are a key part) goes hand in hand with fewer actions against actual criminals like those involved in the recent spate of "flash mob" attacks.

We've seen this before. In the Soviet Gulag depicted in "The Way Back", one of the leads questions why the guards have given so much authority to the Russian mafia within the prison. The answer is that such criminals are just a misunderstood product of bourgeois society, hence friends of the people. But political prisoners, like those who tried to start businesses, had no such excuse; they were the enemies of the people.

Same thing in today's USA. The mob of teens who broke Emily Guendelsberger's leg could not be arrested because the policemen were afraid of charges of racism.

http://mobile.avclub.com/philadelphia/articles/flash-mob-fal...

  All I remember people asking was if they knew anything     
  about the giant group on Broad Street, and then saying 
  no, and the police saying all they could do was something 
  along the lines of chances are good they’ll attack 
  somebody else, and we’ll get them then, we can’t do 
  anything right now. I remember one of them specifically 
  saying "We can’t just go start arresting or picking up 
  black juvenile males." Then he said, "We can’t do 
  anything right now because you can’t identify anybody." I 
  also remember people saying we understood that they 
  should break up the group at least or do something since 
  it was such a large group. And they said basically that 
  if they scattered it would be worse so they weren’t 
  going to do that.

But those self-same policemen know they will get much less resistance, and more money for the state, if they ticket and fine middle-class citizens.

We're trained in school to recognize every little similarity to the Nazis, but are completely ignorant about patterns that are reminiscent of the Soviets.