-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0201i.asp
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An Astonishing Remark
by Sheldon Richman, January 2002
When Attorney General John Ashcroft told the nation, "To those who
scare peace- loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message
is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists," he wasn't blazing any new
trails. He was merely doing what despots and would-be despots always
do: attempting to intimidate into silence those who dare to question
him.
Ashcroft's statement is one of the most astounding things to be said
by a U.S. official in many years. To read it carefully � letting its
full message sink in � is to be overtaken by a sense of horror that
is otherwise hard to imagine. Every American should be offended to
hear the government's chief law enforcement officer equate public
expressions of concern about the threats to liberty from drastic
"anti-terrorism" measures with joining al-Qaeda. Does Ashcroft have
such a low estimate of the American people's intelligence?
Perhaps he needs to become acquainted with Thomas Jefferson. It was Jefferson who
said, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain
ground." That's true in the best of times. It's doubly
true during war � especially an Orwellian undeclared, open-ended crusade against an
enemy as nebulous as "international terrorism." Ashcroft is a perfect Orwellian
character. In 1984, Big Brother told his people that "fr
eedom is slavery." It follows that slavery is freedom. Ashcroft refuses to concede
that the Bush administration is seeking to curtail liberty in the least. Those who see
diminished liberty must be hallucinating, seeing "p
hantoms of lost liberty."
So when the president unilaterally abolishes due process for noncitizens, we are only
imaging an erosion of liberty. And when Congress passes, without even reading, the
administration's alleged anti-terrorism bill, which
expands the government's powers of surveillance, permits secret searches of homes, and
weakens judicial oversight of law enforcement, again, we are deluded if we think
freedom is evaporating. I write "alleged anti-terrori
sm bill" because the new law does not restrict the expanded powers to suspected
terrorists, but applies them to any criminal activity. This is a classic power grab
under the cover of an emergency. September 11 has given p
olicymakers a chance to bring down from the shelf every new police power they have
wanted for years. They assume no one will question the need for such broad powers, and
if anyone does, they can shut him up by portraying
him as an ally of the terrorists. The game is rigged in favor of power.
It is no comfort that the erosion of liberty in the name of fighting terrorism has a
bipartisan cast to it. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York has given his
blessing to oppressive government with an op-ed in t
he Washington Post titled "Big Government Looks Better Now." As Schumer puts it,
barely concealing his glee, "For the foreseeable future, the federal government will
have to grow... The era of a shrinking federal governme
nt has come to a close." Of course, the senator was trying to enlarge it long before
September 11.
Schumer insists that only the federal government "has the breadth, strength and
resources" to keep us secure. Forgive me for asking, but did we not have a federal
government on September 11? Was it not in charge of our se
curity on that date? Then what is the senator talking about? And if it isn't impolite
to ask, just where does the federal government get all those resources? Last time I
checked, it didn't produce anything. It simply took
resources from the people who did produce them.
Once we understand that all government possesses is the power of legal plunder our
whole perspective changes. Schumer insists that "the notion of letting a thousand
different ideas compete and flourish � which works so we
ll to create goods and services � does not work at all in the face of a national
security emergency. Unity of action and purpose is required, and only the federal
government can provide it." But he�s got it wrong. Securit
y is a service. Competition and innovation are valuable in the effort to keep
ourselves safe. The last thing we need is central planning. That�s what we had on
September 11.
Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va.,
author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of Ideas on
Liberty magazine.
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