From the moment of our founding, this country has been haunted by the specter of totalitarian rule. The Constitution was carefully crafted to protect American Citizens from the urges of power-hungry leaders. Over the decades, little by little, power-hungry leaders have dismantled those protections. Most of these actions came with the promise of some reward for citizens foregoing their protections from governments taking their freedoms.
It started when the government started doing things for people who wanted things they did not have. There is an impulse to get something from the government to which we do not own. Part of this involves protecting us from the human emotion of want.
I am not telling stories out of school when I say it is a basic human quality to want more that we have. Not every person has the same appetite for wants so not everyone is ready to trade freedom for wants. Governments induce some to trade that which they want for something they are willing to give up: freedoms.
Most of the time the trade of our freedoms to satisfy some of our wants is above-board so that anyone who wishes to know can know the trade that has been made. The government steps in to give us our wants if we give the government their want of power. The accumulation of power requires us to surrender our freedoms.
We know where people want to start in having the government do things. The quest is to know when they, whoever they are, have gone too far. Said differently, you know where you want to start, where do you intend to end?
When has the government gone too far is a common question. In this 21st century the government is almost all things to all people and a complete force of its own. At times there does not seem to be any limits of the power contained in our servants in the government.
This is even more so of concern this last week with the spotlight on our government, without asking permission, monitoring each and every American without reason. That, my friend, is unreasonable. There was not a debate, not a dialog, just a group of our servants who decided to spy on each and every American.
Let us reason together: what we Americans are told is that the government must be all-powerful to protect us. They cannot protect us unless we turn over our Constitutional Rights. Well, that logic is wrong. Who will protect us from an over-zealous government bent on having infinite power over the American Citizens?
In today’s world there is no presumption of citizen privacy, not in conversation, writing or even a privacy from being watched by the unblinking eye of government minders regardless of if we are in our backyards or our beds. There is no presumed privacy. Again, for our own protection is what we are being told by the all-powerful government.
With the collection of DNA the last human secrets are not ours. Our problem, our real problem is that the loss of our ownership of ourselves was taken one small item at a time. First this “reasonable” loss of our personal freedom then another “reasonable” loss of another freedom. What is left to take from us? We Americans can be held without warrant and we can be slaughtered by our government without judicial review.
And the loss of our freedoms is still not enough for our government. The end-game is most certainly a total dictatorship. The loss of freedom is never all at once, it is always incremental. It is always “reasonable” until it becomes unreasonable.
Having an all-powerful government watching the communications of every citizen without any presumption of doing something wrong is the road to ruin for our society. Do we have any servants left or are we the servants to the government? Time will tell.
Dr. Michael Swickard hosts the syndicated radio talk show News New Mexico on six to nine a.m. Monday - Friday on a number of New Mexico radio stations and through streaming. Email: michael@swickard.com
