WHY WORRY?

Don't we NEED to sacrifice liberty in times like these? Don't we need more government control in order to prevent acts of violence that could come at any time or place?

These are the honest concerns of many Americans. But they are based on two unfortunate things.

• First, they are based on an abandonment of our heritage as free Americans, which not only undermines their liberty, but defeats their desire for security!
• Second, they are based on very primitive "hard-wired" human psychology that builds social structure around the power of elite individuals and fundamentally denies equality.

Abandoned heritage? Yes. People have forgotten -- or, in probably most cases, were never taught -- the ingenious new model of government our Founders developed. Even less do people understand how that model, just by its nature, provides much greater security for ordinary people than any "top-down" monarchy, dictatorship, or oligarchy (government by an elite, which pure democracies inevitably become).

That new model provided for what we call "distributed security," as compared to the common notion of security imposed by central authority and control. The basic idea is this: whenever something bad happens that requires a quick and decisive, forceful response to protect those who would otherwise be victims, who is there? When gang members invade your home, can you just call the cop in the next room to take care of things? Hardly.

But you are there. The inescapable fact is that you, if properly equipped and trained, could likely handle the situation. But let's assume you need help anyway. There's no cop around, remember! But there are probably other people -- family members, neighbors, passers-by -- close enough to respond to a call for help. What if they, too, were both equipped and trained to deal with a violent criminal, an enemy invader ... whoever might be bringing violence into your life?

The Founders knew that ordinary people were capable of defending themselves, their families, and their neighbors. They had been doing it, all around America, for as long as they had been here! They had no real doubts that Americans would be able to protect themselves, or that they would be able to render justice to the criminals among them. Their security lay in the fact that the ability to respond to violence wasn't concentrated in a few hands, but could be possessed by all responsible adults. This is distributed security.

The gravest worry of the Founders was that this new nation of free individuals rather than subjects would lose their freedom as their own government began hungrily to accumulate power. But that concern, too, was answered by distributed security. They knew that no foreign power, no government of their own making, and no army of their own government could prevail against an armed and trained populace determined to reject tyranny. So they wrote a guarantee into the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment, declaring that the government would never be able to deny military weapons to the people. They declared the important reason for this right up front: an armed populace (by definition, the "militia") that is well trained with weapons based on common varieties of ammunition they could share if need be (the term for this was "well regulated") was "necessary to the security of a free State". Not a state in bondage to a king or a Führer, but a FREE state of free people.

The fundamental point here is this: The people must never be prevented from rejecting tyranny because they lack the means to stand up for themselves. If the government decides it wants to rule rather than serve, distributed security lets the people take back their government.

OK, maybe you're convinced that the desire for a government crack-down on terrorists by means of scrutinizing everyone -- at check points, in their daily business, in their personal communications, etc. -- is destructive of liberty. But won't it provide a payoff in improved security? We've already shown that distributed security is vastly better at dealing with violence where and when it occurs. But how about preventing violence?

Well, let's examine the success of a similar attempt by government to prevent bad things. They don't want drugs or guns in prisons, do they? And they have the prisoners completely contained, always under a watchful eye. They monitor the visitors, the mail, theoretically any route whereby drugs or guns could be smuggled into prison.

They can't stop drugs and even guns from reaching the inmates.

So how are they going to stop the weapons of terrorists from entering a free country? Or even a not-so-free one? Or even one in which all the citizens are controlled as thoroughly as inmates are in prison?

The plain fact is this: Unless you control people down to their every thought, you can't always prevent them from doing harm to others. The very best you can do is to be alert and prepared to stop harm when it occurs, and then to punish the guilty swiftly and severely, showing would-be copycats that they had better think twice about doing likewise. Distributed security is best at doing the first part, and an honest and fair judicial system is needed for the latter. You'll notice that a strong, unquestioned central authority has no role to play in a healthy society.

So ... not only is the outright prevention of violence an impossible goal in a free society, but the attempt to achieve it destroys liberty for everyone. The legal term for attempts to prevent people from doing wrong is 'prior restraint'. For good reason, our legal system has always been suspicious of prior restraint, because it effectively punishes people by restricting their freedom before they have been convicted of any wrongdoing. In the name of "guaranteeing security," however, even the Supreme Court has "gotten over it." For about a quarter century now, they have allowed law enforcement to place suspects in "preventive detention" on just the suspicion that they might do bad things if not kept in custody -- no trial required!

Yes, we have been on a winding path toward a police state for a very long time.

Hard-wired psychology? It's the way we tend to organize our social groups when we're not really being careful about it, or critically analyzing what results will likely emerge from such a structure. We see it in primitive tribes, in gangs ... and in most governments throughout history.

It's a primate thing. We share, with the apes, monkeys, lemurs, marmosets, and other primates, the tendency to believe that the fundamental issue is who will prevail ... not what is right. Primates are hierarchical critters, and they tend to organize their societies around strong leaders ... who basically make "law" as they see fit. That model of governance runs from the pre-human African savannah right through 18th Century Europe.

Americans started out by doing things dramatically differently from that old primate approach. Our forefathers cared about principle.

In the bad old days before the American Revolution, governments (and sometimes churches, which functioned as governments in many cases) effectively had all the rights. People might get permission, or otherwise be allowed to do ordinary things like earn a living, live in peace and privacy, travel about freely, meet and communicate with their neighbors, etc. If their rulers were feeling generous, that is.

The important thing to understand about government as reinvented in America is that government no longer has rights. Only people do. In fact, no groups have special rights that come from belonging to a group. All they have is their individual rights. You and I together can never have more rights than just the sum of the rights we have individually.

Maybe you've noticed that hardly anyone seems to believe this any longer. The Constitution hasn't been amended to change the fundamental nature of government, yet government officials tend to behave for all the world as though we're back in 18th Century Europe. They think sovereignty rests in the government -- not in the individual. They think the job of government is to control the people -- not to serve them.

Today, Americans still believe they're free. After all, we're taught that America is "the land of the free." But the truth is harshly different.

Americans believe they are free because it is relatively easy to get permission from the government to do what they want.

Usually.

If the government has "a problem" with you ... well, you're out of luck.

Here's an example. Many years ago, the government had a problem with those who sold and consumed alcoholic beverages. They went so far as to amend the Constitution to allow regulation of alcohol by the federal government. Why? Because they knew the Constitution as written didn't give government the power to dictate what an individual could consume. The pesky Law of Unintended Consequences produced not a lasting improvement in the rate of alcoholism in America, but instead an explosion of organized crime, deaths from tainted bootleg alcohol, drive-by shootings, and all manner of other mayhem. America realized their mistake and repealed that constitutional amendment. As Homer Simpson would say, "Doh!"

Today, the government presumes it has the power to dictate what an individual consumes (sound familiar?) -- and is therefore engaged in a great War on Drugs. The Law of Unintended Consequences happily came right back to produce an explosion of organized crime, deaths from tainted bootleg drugs, drive-by shootings, and all manner of other mayhem. But the government never attempted to amend the Constitution this time. They knew that wouldn't work. Instead, they simply announced a crisis and instituted their measures of control and interdiction. People for the most part happily went along with that.

How successful has the War on Drugs been? Well, you can still get drugs in prison -- under the most tightly controlled circumstances that exist in this country. I'd call that an abject failure ... unless the point wasn't to control drug sales and use, but to control the people. That objective has been a resounding success. Random highway stops, on the pretext of traffic violations or even just safety concerns, are routinely used to search for drugs.

You can test the extent of your remaining freedom in many ways (though we don't recommend it). Try to carry, say, $10,000 cash with you as you fly across the country. Try even to pay for your ticket in cash! Make any kind of bank transaction that is "unusual" or crosses a threshold (typically $5,000), and bank employees are required to report you ... all so that the government can make sure you aren't using your liberty "improperly."

Asset forfeitures without a trial -- or even formal charges; manditory minimum sentences; no-knock raids; warrantless searches; "drug diversion" (read "therapy by extortion") programs ... the list is almost endless. Your freedom has been horrendously damaged by the War on Drugs.

The newly declared War on Terrorism promises to be even more successful than the War on Drugs -- which is to say that it won't solve the original problem, but it will even more effectively consolidate power and erode our liberties.

The desire to impose government control in order to deal with problems in society has not just undermined, but almost completely eradicated the limited constitutional republic that the Founders gave us.

Having begun with a federal government that the people allowed to do only a few things, as long as they served the people's interests, today we have reversed that relationship. We now have a federal government that allows people to do things, as long as they serve the government's interest.

As bad as things had become, though, up until recently the government still paid lip service to the Bill of Rights. But September 11 changed everything. Now, the protections of individual rights in those first ten amendments to our Constitution are just obstacles to the control government seeks in its War on Terrorism. Now, you see government officials abandoning the pretense that they believe individual rights are the important values, and coming out openly and insistently in favor of turning those rights into government-granted privileges.

We need to restore the rule of law in America -- and that means restoring respect for and adherence to the Constitution.

To get down to business, continue on to the What Can I Do? page. Or, at any time, simply select a new topic from the menu at the bottom of each page.