Descending into the rabbit-hole of the government’s apparent
war on liberty and privacy, it’s easy to get lost. It’s dirty, deep, and as each new leak
provides some illumination, the motives and actions of this government become
ever darker. Whether it’s the IRS’s
selectively targeting the administration’s political enemies, or the Department
of Justice’s spying on major news networks, or the National Security
Administration’s securing secret court orders to track and store the everyday
phone conversations of innocent Americans, there can be no question -- America
today is a dystopian visage of its former self.
If the scandals themselves do not evidence our
predicament well enough, consider the unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers
during Obama’s administration.
In the annals of national security, the Obama
administration will long be remembered for its crackdown on
whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has
employed the WWI-era Espionage Act a record six times to prosecute officials
suspected of leaking classified information.
[…]
By using the NSA to spy on Americans, [NSA
whistleblower] Binney told me, the United States has created a police state
with few parallels in history: “It’s better than anything that the KGB, the
Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had.”
He compared the situation to the Weimar Republic, a brief period of
liberal democracy that preceded the Nazi takeover of Germany. “We’re just waiting to turn the key,” he
said.
Appraising why and how this bleak scenario came to
pass is a quagmire complicated not only by partisanship, but by
the sheer scope of it all. If you
consider each scandal individually, it’s simply too much for an ordinary person
to process. After all, if we were to
join Obama’s lemmings in their leap of faith, we’d believe that the intricacies
of bloated government bureaucracy left even Obama in the dark about some
of this, despite it being his business to stay on top of such things in his
administration.
So how could we average Americans have any in-depth understanding
of all this? However much we might like
the notion of individual liberty and despise the government’s suppression of it,
we’re too busy with our menial jobs trying to produce wealth for ourselves, the
government, and our neighbor that lives on the government dole, all the while fighting
big government expansionists at every turn in efforts to make our progeny
self-sufficient producers, in hopes that future generations might become
something more substantial than a gaggle of Julia’s,
feeding for a lifetime at a communal trough.
Is it any wonder that the flood of insidious details
about these scandals drives the average American to indifference? I can
think of no other reason that, according
to Pew, 56% of Americans find nothing wrong with the NSA’s
tracking and storing everyday phone conversations without reasonable cause. If asked whether they agree with the principles
of the Fourth Amendment, I’d wager that a vast majority of Americans would
answer in the affirmative. So what else but numbness could cause the majority of Americans to believe that the government has a
right to willfully and blatantly violate
it?
It is the natural tendency of government to
manipulate the will and finances of the people to serve its own ends. This incontrovertible truth caused Thomas
Paine to observe
that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst
state an intolerable one.” And thwarting
this natural tendency of government is the very reason that our Constitution,
providing a rigid framework of limited central government, was penned.
When government overreaches its Constitutional
boundaries, it becomes ever more “intolerable,” and individual liberties
disappear. Given the Constitution’s explicit
prohibitions,
the government can’t simply set the Constitution alight and rebrand overnight without public outcry.
Rather, it strikes liberties incrementally, under the
guise of crisis management and benevolence, until one day -- a day like today
-- the Constitution and its Amendments like the Fourth no longer have any
meaning, and the people can’t even seem to remember why the Amendment was there
in the first place.
Our government has done precisely this. And the primary method of its malevolence, to this
point, has been to assume ever more control of your money and property via tax legislation, federal spending, and regulation. But that's not were it ends.
As Mark Steyn points out in a driving theme in After America: Get Ready for Armageddon:
“It starts with the money. For dominant powers in decline, it always does.”
“It starts with the money,” he says, “but it never
stops there.”
Steyn gives us an idea about where he believes it
ends:
Conservatives often talk about small government,
which in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms. They’re for big government, and when you’re
arguing for the small alternative, it’s easy to sound pinched and mean and
grudging. But small government gives you
big freedoms. And big government leaves you with very little freedom.
The opposite of big government is not small
government, but big liberty. The
bailout, and the stimulus, and the budget, and the trillion dollar deficits are
not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic of the productive sector to
the least dynamic and productive. When
governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of
individual liberty. You fundamentally
change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer
to that of junkie and pusher. And you make
it very difficult ever to change back.
In the end, it’s not about money, but about
something more fundamental. Yes, you can
tax people to the hilt, and give them free healthcare, and free homes, and free
food, but in doing so you turn them into, if not yet slaves, then pets. And that’s the nub of it. Big government leads to small liberty and
small men.
Liberty is profoundly tied to capitalism, free
markets, and the eschewing of increased government control of wealth -- and
while not the sole ingredients for liberty, they are necessary ones. Steyn has not been the first to notice this
correlation. Milton Friedman said as
much to an audience member in a taped appearance at Cornell University. At about 8:25 of this video,
we see a gentleman in army fatigues ask:
I see society as more and more tending to the
usurping of my individual rights and freedoms as time goes by. What do you see as the ultimate end of this,
i.e., either in democracy or socialism, and why do you think the individuals
within this society are letting this happen to them?
What is “the ultimate end of this,” in Friedman’s
eyes? He isn’t one to mince words, and
he implies that finding the end is the easier part of his question to answer. And like Steyn, he traces the roots of
liberty’s erosion to government appropriation of wealth.
If we continue along the road we’ve been going on,
of usurping more and more power to government officials to control our lives, I
see only one end. And that’s the loss of
anything that has any meaning as democracy, a loss of human freedoms, and a
prison state. That’s the end.
Why are they letting this happen to them? That’s a
much more difficult question to answer.
I think that is largely because of ignorance about where they are
going. A lack of recognition. I don’t believe they want to go this
road. But I believe they are unwittingly
letting themselves go down this road, because on each issue that comes up,
people look at their separate special interest instead of the broader interest
in governmental activity. Everyone wants
to cut down government, provided that those things he has an interest in are
maintained.
[…]
The solution is for people like you and me to
talk. To ourselves, and to our fellows,
and to try to persuade our fellow free men to be of like mind. To change the climate of opinion in these
respects, to try to correct the political structure … I’ve been recently
working on one particular proposal along those lines, which is to have a
Constitutional Amendment setting a maximum limit on the amount that the
government may spend. I won’t go into
the details, but I think fundamentally, we are getting what the public at large
has been asking for. And the public is asking for it, I believe, because they
do not understand where it’s going to lead them.
It has led us to where we are today, an environment
in which we have no idea which individual liberties the government will choose
to recognize or ignore. We just know
that this choice seems to be at the government’s discretion. And we are clearly not done traversing the
path Friedman describes.
We never got that Amendment setting a spending limit
for government. As a result, government
has never been bigger than today, and liberty has never been smaller than
today. After nearly a century of amassed
government control of Americans’ wealth, we are but a turn of the key from a
prison state, if NSA whistleblowers in the know are to be believed.
In the last century we have witnessed the reimplementation
of a progressive income tax that supplanted tariffs as the chief revenue source
of the federal government, the legislation of the redistributive Titanics
called Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and the establishment and perpetual
expansion of the welfare state, mimicking Euro-democracies that are now
collapsing under that gargantuan yoke. In
the last decade alone, government expansion has gone into hyper-drive, acting
as broker for the taxpayers in buying billions in worthless assets for banks’
benefit, investing billions more taxpayer dollars in a stimulus package that
did little to stimulate, and the government has procured administrative control
of the healthcare industry, a significant driver of American GDP. Even as we speak, the government is seeking
to legislate even more control over the American economy by granting amnesty to
illegal aliens and granting previously legislated federal benefits to them as
reward for their having broken our laws, increasing the liability of the
productive class and ensuring the need for more aggressive redistributive
measures in the future.
We don’t have time to be ignorant anymore about
where we are headed, or the manner in which we’ve been cobbling the path to get
there. It starts with the money -- it
will end in a prison state, and the latter isn’t going to manifest itself
decades hence, but at any moment. All it
takes is the right crisis, real or manufactured.
It’s not enough that we wait around for 2014 in
hopes to get the right people in office to support “big liberty” instead of
“big government.” As Milton Friedman said
in 1975, which he alludes to in the above-linked video and which Steyn cites in
After America:
I do not believe that the solution to our problem is
to simply elect the right people. The
important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make
it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the
wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right
thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.
This is why it is important that we work to change
the direction of our public discourse.
We must demand that our representatives recognize that the purpose of
our government is not to provide Americans with collectivized benefits. The purpose of our government is to preserve
Americans’ individual liberty. And increased
government spending at this dire breakpoint, in any capacity, wholly subverts
liberty.
And if the American people cannot be made to see
that, well… our end is loosely written for us.
William Sullivan
