|
Written by Sheldon Richman
|
|
Friday, 01 February 2002 |
An Astounding Remark
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
"freedom 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
"phantoms 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-terrorism
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
policymakers 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
the 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
government 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 security
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
well 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. Security
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 a senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va., author of Tethered Citizens: Why We Must Abolish the Welfare State, and editor of Ideas on Liberty magazine.
Also by Sheldon Richman
The Multiracial Activist - Count Me Out
The Multiracial Activist - Elian's Fate: It's Not America's Decision
The Multiracial Activist - Reno's Disgrace
The Multiracial Activist - Of, By, And For The People?
The Multiracial Activist - Preventing Holocausts
The Multiracial Activist - Terrorism and the Drug War
The Multiracial Activist - An Unkeepable Promise
The Abolitionist Examiner - The Key To Race: Depoliticize It
Book: Your Money or Your Life
Book: Separating School and State
Copyright © 2002 The Future of Freedom Foundation. All rights reserved.
|
