America's Friend: The Honorable
Congressman Ron Paul
Last week’s announcement that
the terrorist threat warning level has been raised in parts of New
York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. has led to dramatic and
unprecedented restrictions on the movements of citizens. Americans
wishing to visit the U.S. Capitol must, for example, pass through
several checkpoints and submit to police inspection of their cars
and persons.
Many Americans support
the new security measures because they claim to feel safer when the government
issues terror alerts and fills the streets with militarized police forces. As
one tourist interviewed this week said, “It makes me feel comfortable to know
that everything is being checked.” It is ironic that tourists coming to
Washington to celebrate the freedoms embodied in the Declaration of Independence
are so eager to give up those freedoms with no questions asked.
Freedom is not defined
by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without
government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor
would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian
society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would
require total state control over its citizens’ lives. This doesn’t stop
governments, including our own, from seeking more control over and intrusion
into our lives. As one Member of Congress stated to the press last week, “people
who don’t want to be searched don’t need to come on Capitol grounds.” What an
insult! The Capitol belongs to the American people who pay for it, not to
Congress or the police.
It is worth noting that
the government rushes first to protect itself, devoting enormous resources to
make places like the Capitol grounds safe, while just beyond lies one of the
most dangerous neighborhoods in the nation. What makes Congress more worthy of
protection from terrorists than ordinary citizens?
To understand the nature
of our domestic response to the September 11th, 2001 attacks, we must understand
the nature of government. Government naturally expands, and any crises- whether
real or manufactured- serve to justify more and more government power over our
lives. Bureaucrats have used the tragedy of 9-11 as an excuse to seize police
powers sought for decades, such as warrantless searches, internet monitoring,
and access to bank records. It should be no surprise that the recently released
report of the 9-11 Commission has but one central recommendation: bigger
government and more spending at home and abroad.
Every new security
measure represents another failure of the once-courageous American spirit. The
more we change our lives, the more we obsess about terrorism, the more the
terrorists have won. As commentator Lew Rockwell of the Ludwig von Mises
Institute explains, terrorists in effect have been elevated by our response to
9-11: “They are running the country. They determine our civic life. They
shape our private life. They decide how public resources are spent. They may
dictate who gets to be the next president. It should be obvious that the
government doesn’t object. Not at all. The government benefits, by getting
ever more reason for ever more money and power.”
Every generation must
resist the temptation to believe that it lives in the most dangerous time in
American history. The threat of Islamic terrorism is real, but it is not the
greatest danger ever faced by our nation. This is not to dismiss the threat of
terrorism, but rather to put it in perspective. Those who seek to whip the
nation into a frenzy of fear do a disservice to a country that expelled the
British, fought two world wars, and stared down the Soviet empire.
Liberty is lost through
complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome
automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and
paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American
heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government.
Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long. END
August 9th, 2004
