Sacrificing Liberty Does Not Increase Security
It’s a cliché that in time of war we must shift the balance between liberty and security, sacrificing some freedom to protect our society from assault. Funny how we blithely forget other fond adages when they become unfashionable, such as Benjamin Franklin’s famous warning about trading freedom for security.
It is more important than ever that we get our pronouns right. Advocates of deficit spending used to parry the concerns of balanced-budget champions by saying that “we owe it to ourselves.” This was obviously untrue. I certainly did not borrow from myself. Nor, I suspect, did you. There was no “we-ness” about it, but a whole lot of “they-ness.”
There is something analogous in the current discussion of the balance between liberty and security, which has been moved manifestly toward the side falsely labeled “security” with the USA Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department, and the Pentagon’s ominous Information Awareness Office (IAO). “We” won’t be giving up liberty for security. Rather, a small subset of “we”—namely, “they”—will take our liberty without our informed consent, albeit with the promise that we’ll be safer in the process. The age-old question, of course, is: who will protect us from our protectors?
Before someone objects that “they” were elected by us, realize that our “representatives” were under such pressure to pass the Patriot Act and the homeland security legislation that they were not given time to read the voluminous bills. Thus it was only lately revealed that the homeland security bill, which was said to be merely an efficient reorganization of government agencies, actually expands the power of the federal government to intrude on our privacy.
That intrusion will come largely at the hands of the IAO. Its director, John Poindexter, has made the modest proposal that his office be given access to records of our electronic activities so that the agency can compile a huge database and look for patterns suggesting terrorist intent. The official seal of the IAO is the eye in the pyramid (see the back of the one-dollar bill) peering out over the globe. The Poindexter program sports the Orwellian name “Total Information Awareness System” and the motto “Knowledge Is Power”—a benign slogan, until you remind yourself whom the agency wants to acquire knowledge about and thus power over.
As news of the program spilled out, official spokesmen tried to reassure us with words like “safeguards” and “oversight.” That’s what they always say.
This is about the time that we should remind ourselves that, as Thomas Jefferson said in 1798, after passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts: “free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”
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California homeschool families heard from their state government recently. It seems they’ve all been breaking the law by not sending their children to school. Steven Greenhut explains.
With all the jabber about national identification and identity theft, Garry Wang thought it would be useful to review the history of the device that is most responsible for the threat to everyone’s privacy: the Social Security number.
If you want to know why the state of economic knowledge is so poor, there might be no better place to look for an answer than the definitions of economics posted on university websites. Arthur Foulkes conducts the educational tour.
Consumer choice is an inconvenience for some people. But the different ways that capitalism and communism handle efforts to quash it speaks volumes, as Richard Coffman and R. Ashley Lyman explain.
The federal government administers a disability-payments program that bears a passing resemblance to real disability insurance. But the similarities are superficial, according to Robert Wright.
In our overcautious age, the conventional wisdom says children should wear helmets when bicycling. Ted Roberts wishes to dissent.
A time-honored American principle holds that the military may not be involved in domestic law-enforcement. As Gene Healy shows, that principle is now under assault.
The same government that brought you water-saving toilets wants to design your high-definition television. Michael Heberling says stay tuned for a flop.
The recent business scandals have cast a shadow over accounting. Chris Edwards finds a review of the history of the profession worthwhile.
When big-government advocates say tax cuts aren’t needed, they clearly aren’t thinking about how marginal tax rates discourage effort. But Daniel Klein and Allan Raish are thinking about it.
Some highly successful entrepreneurs didn’t find success until middle age or later. Larry Schweikart believes it’s good they kept trying.
Here’s what our columnists have been hard at work on. Lawrence Reed discusses some research that union leaders would rather not hear about. Doug Bandow laments the dark side of the world. Burton Folsom looks at a wartime president who actually remembered the Constitution. Donald Boudreaux finds virtue in self-interest. Charles Baird has the scoop on the west coast dock strike. And James Bovard, hearing it said that new anti-gun laws will protect against snipers, rejoins, “It Just Ain’t So!”
In the book department, our reviewers take on volumes about the fairness of the marketplace, property and technology, government’s shortcomings, Adam Smith, the damage done by bad philosophy, and the decline of Western culture.
—Sheldon Richman
