Choosing Security Over Liberty
I stumbled across this article on the Detroit News website; and, to be frank, it scared me. In a poll of 1,000 Americans conducted by The Williamsburg Foundation, forty-nine percent of respondents agreed with the assertion that “if we need to relinquish some of our personal freedoms and privacies to protect our country, we should be prepared to do that.”
Of those that responded, fifty-three percent also believed that the FBI should be allowed even more power to monitor the daily lives of US citizens. Keep in mind that this is in addition to the virtually unlimited power to tap your phone and to monitor your email that the FBI has already been granted by the USA PATRIOT Act. All the government has to do is suspect you of acts “relating to terrorism”(1)—which includes mail fraud and computer abuse!(2) All they have to do is cite that they suspect you of being engaged in conspiring to conduct acts of domestic terrorism as defined by Section 802 of that same Act. That means that you have to be suspected—not convicted, mind you—of acts which “appear to be intended…to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion”(3).
For those of you keeping score at home, this means that the founding fathers of the United States of America were terrorists(4).
There are solid, wise reasons why our Constitution placed limits on the power of governments, folks. The revolutionaries that set up the government in the US did not themselves trust government. Don’t believe me? Here are some quotes:
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.” (George Washington)
“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” (Samuel Adams)
“That government is best which governs the least because its people discipline themselves.” (Thomas Jefferson)
These gentlemen created a system of government with checks and balances in order to make it difficult for government to do much of anything. They wanted a system would eliminate abuse of power. That wanted a system in which the hands of government were bound so that they could not interfere with the persuit of happiness of individual Americans. Let me reiterate: These men didn’t trust government, and they understood that it was, at best, a necessary evil(5).
Our society, on the other hand, seems to be perfectly content to trust our government. We allow them to force us to participate in a government-sponsored retirement plan. We allow them to take a percentage of our income for the purposes of wealth redistribution. We allow them to send our young people off to fight battles whose only real purpose is to keep the defense industry (and therefore the US economy) afloat. Now we want to entrust our government with the ability to ignore our civil liberties and Constitutionally-granted rights in the name of “protecting” us. I’m sorry, folks. I just don’t trust the government that much. I tend to side with Benjamin Franklin’s assertion that “[t]hey that give up liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The only valid answer to the question of how much freedom you’re willing to give up for the government to fight terrorism is none at all, folks. If you trust the government to control itself and protect your civil liberties, then you are a fool and the government has already won.
Footnotes
- USA PATRIOT Act, Section 201 (2).
- USA PATRIOT Act, Section 202.
- USA PATRIOT Act, Section 802.
- In fact, here’s a fun and on-topic quote from Charles Austin Beard: “You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.”
- I’m almost directly quoting Thomas Paine’s Common Sense here. Paine said, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”