Exactly three years ago, I posted a simple quiz about libertarians and patriotism.
The two questions in that quiz are illuminating since they highlight how libertarians in some cases may differ from conservatives (click here for more on that issue), but I also included this t-shirt, which seems to capture the mindset of a lot of Americans regardless of their political outlook.
Well, it seems that Mark Twain had the same attitude as the young lady in the photo, at least if we can believe the quote in this Steve Breen cartoon.
Simply stated, our loyalty should be to a set of ideals, not to any particular group of people who happen to hold power.
What makes the cartoon so effective, though, is the inclusion of an IRS thug and a snoop from the NSA.
Reminds me of this cartoon about Obama and the Founding Fathers.
But there’s a serious point to discuss. Are we losing our freedoms and giving the state too much power and authority?
According to a recent news report, a former lieutenant colonel for the infamous East German STASI spy agency says the NSA-type snooping ability “would have been a dream come true.”
Wolfgang Schmidt…pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face. “You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi. In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.
I’ve already written that we do have enemies and that I think it’s okay to spy on those enemies (though I want the government to get judicial approval before spying on Americans).
But I also wrote that spying should be subject to cost-benefit analysis. The NSA info-gathering exercise reminds me of anti-money laundering laws and those laws are a costly failure. They invade our privacy, hurt the poor, impose high regulatory costs, and have little or no impact on underlying crimes.
We also need to be concerned about potential misuse of data, whether by people currently in the government or those that will have access to the information in the future.
This is what worries me the most. Simply stated, I don’t trust people in government. Which, rather ironically, means I’m in agreement with a former STASI bigwig.
Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said. “It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”
Hmmm… maybe being warned about the risk of unrestrained government by a former communist spy is the modern equivalent of being called ugly by a frog?
In any event, I suppose Herr Schmidt has first-hand knowledge of the danger of giving government too much information.
P.S. Speaking of first-hand knowledge, it’s somewhat amusing that former communists in Russia and current communists in China have told the Europeans that the welfare state breeds too much dependency.
P.P.S. While this post has touched on libertarians and patriotism, fairness requires me to acknowledge that leftist politicians also believe in a form of patriotism.