Wehrwolfen
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- May 22, 2012
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In its pursuit of ‘safety,’ the government is sacrificing freedom
02/06/2013
By Gary Johnson
Immediately after the horrific attacks on America on September 11, 2001, President Bush and Congress went to work enacting laws they said would make us safer from such attacks in the future. That was not a shocking reaction — and their intentions were understandable. After all, even those of us who advocate the smallest government possible agree that the federal government has a fundamental and constitutional duty to defend us from harm.
But when politicians decide to make us safer, they too often get it really wrong. It is the very nature of government to solve a problem by making itself bigger and more intrusive, and to increase its power at the expense of our freedom and, yes, the very same rights that our elected officials are sworn to protect.
After 9/11, the president and Congress “protected” us with the Patriot Act, expansions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an overreaching NDAA, and a host of other measures — both legislative and executive — that gave the federal government powers over our daily lives that would have been unimaginable to the Founders. Our library cards, our cell phones, our computers, our travel, and even our bank accounts became the business of bureaucrats and federal law enforcement.
It became OK to let the government put us on “no-fly” lists, to grope us at airports, and to be notified if we happen to move too much money around. Privacy? Well, that’s pretty much gone. And as laid out in a memo that surfaced in recent days, it even became OK for the government to assassinate American citizens who that same government had labeled as terrorists.
globalvolunteernetwork.org/safe_place.
Read more:
In its pursuit of safety, the government is sacrificing freedom | The Daily Caller
