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Democrats demand U.S. Big 3 offer survival plan
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Marsal to lead team of over 600 at Lehman
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Paulson defends handling of U.S. financial crisis
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Dell profit tops Street view, shares rise
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Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac suspend some foreclosures
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two biggest U.S. home loan finance companies, on Thursday said they would suspend foreclosures of occupied homes until early 2009,...
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Written by Jordan Brown
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Thursday, 17 July 2008 16:40 |
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If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
(“Who watches the watchmen?”)
Juvenal
“If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?” That phrase, perhaps more than any other, is the siren song of the nanny state tyrants and their apologists. It’s been used to defend innumerable government intrusions into the lives of individuals, from the Patriot Act to a proposal that surveillance cameras be placed in private homes, and it can usually be found in the comment section of any news article examining government invasion of privacy. Recently, Missouri Senator Christopher Bond used a version of this argument to defend his vote for passage of the egregious FISA bill, which expands the Federal Government’s wiretapping powers and grants immunity to the telephone companies that participated in President Bush’s post-9/11 surveillance activities. According to Senator Bond, you don’t have anything to worry about, “unless you have al Qaeda on your speed dial.”
Those who employ this meaningless phrase and adhere to the bankrupt philosophy behind it are not content with taking our liberties, they also want us to distrust the motives of anyone who would question their authority to do so. Just ignore Big Brother while he peers into your bank account and listens to your phone calls, they say, and instead focus on the shadowy criminals and terrorist-sympathizers who hate our freedom. And if we refuse to accept the trampling of our rights quietly our loyalties are questioned with such fervor that one would think defending the U.S. Constitution was step-one in waging a jihad. It’s the ultimate bait and switch, and it doesn’t even make sense on the statists’ own grounds.
The most obvious problem with the assertion that ‘only those who are doing something wrong need worry,’ is that the state determines what is ‘wrong,’ or more accurately, what is illegal. The ‘wrongdoers’ who are told they should worry about a new law could be genuine criminals, or they could be those belonging to a particular religious group, racial minority, or political ideology. Governments have a long, rich history of persecuting their citizens and enacting bizarre, harmful laws. One recent example of such absurdity is Flint Michigan’s baggy pants law. If the government is willing to imprison (for up to a year!) those who wear their pants too low—according to the state—can we rest any easier when they say a new law will only effect ‘wrongdoers?’ Is their definition of ‘wrong’ something on which you are willing to bank your freedom?
But let’s assume for a moment that we can have the highest trust in the various officers of the state, and are willing to grant them a great deal of authority in deciding what is wrong; can we also trust future presidents and members of congress with the same level of authority? Politicians come and go, but the programs they create and the power they grant themselves are passed on to future presidents, congressmen, and bureaucrats. Once taken, power is rarely relinquished, and commonly expanded beyond its original bounds. Moreover, just because a citizen’s particular action is not yet illegal does not mean it won’t be taped, and possibly disseminated, by a bureaucrat with a vendetta or voyeuristic streak. There are always promises that checks will be put into place to prevent such abuses, but does anyone take those promises seriously? When the State Department loses several hundred laptops containing sensitive information do you really think they can guarantee that your information won’t be lost, published, or used as blackmail?
The final and most important reason that this argument for more state power is so absurd is that many of the injustices it defends are blatantly unconstitutional. Of course, to many of those who use the ‘if you aren’t doing anything wrong’ argument the Constitution and the notion of rights that are beyond the scope of any government to suspend are not as important as ‘democracy.’ But if democratic government is the greatest good and can trump Constitutional protections, Senator Bond and his cronies look like even bigger fools when they demand that we see things from their perspective. It would be far more honest if they stopped hiding behind ‘democracy’ or the ‘will of the people’ and simply proclaimed that the only values they represent are those of their surveillance-state comrades.
But perhaps Senator Bond and his ilk would be willing to let us install video cameras in public buildings so we can watch what they are doing with our tax dollars—at least then they’d be walkin’ the walk, right? Such consistency would be refreshing, but don’t count on it; they don’t buy their own arguments either. In my home state of New Hampshire, citizens who record their interactions with police, both in public and in their own homes, are often prosecuted for wiretapping. Casual research indicates that this is the rule, not the exception.
So I ask: “If they aren’t doing anything wrong, what do they have to worry about?”
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