Are we a free people or are we not?
The recently-escalated battle between the American people and the TSA is far more important than it first appears. The final outcome of this argument will determine whether we still live in a nation "of the people, by the people, for the people", or whether we have become a soft tyranny where our democratic forms of elections and representatives have been reduced to a meaningless veneer as in the old Soviet Union or Red China.
The Consent of the Governed
If America has a single founding principle, it is this: no government has any authority to take any action without the consent of the governed. Our Founding Fathers did not object to the principle of paying taxes per se; they objected strongly to the idea of being forced to pay taxes to a government where they had no input. Freedom's cry was not "No taxation" then, and it isn't now; it was "No taxation without representation." The same goes for any other intrusive regulation.
The concept of "the consent of the governed" means more than just voting, however. A hundred years ago, Prohibition was enacted scrupulously according to democratic forms: Congress and then the required number of states passed a constitutional amendment allowing it, and then Congress and the President passed the Volstead Act enforcing it.
However, events quickly revealed that Prohibition did not have the consent of the governed, or at least a very sizable minority of them: whole sectors of American society insisted on having their booze no matter what the law said. The end result was vast wealth poured into crime syndicates; eventually Prohibition was repealed with the nation much the worse off for the experience.
There are many laws on the books today which do not really have the consent of the governed, but the government enforces them with a light touch so as not to provoke a backlash. Consider speed limits: almost everybody speeds, and the police almost never ticket people for going just a hair over. You usually have to be speeding by a good bit, and even then, getting caught is relatively rare. If the police seriously tried to ticket every single speeder, voters would demand that the limits be changed.
Or so we've always assumed - after all, government ultimately answers to the people, doesn't it?
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"The recently-escalated battle between the American people and the TSA is far more important than it first appears. The final outcome of this argument will determine whether we still live in a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people”, or whether we have become a soft tyranny where our democratic forms of elections and representatives have been reduced to a meaningless veneer as in the old Soviet Union or Red China.”
ReplyDeleteEchoes of the ominous Tim Wise threat: “You have won a small battle in a larger war the meaning of which you do not remotely understand.”
A couple of decades ago, Jews still kept the friend mask on, mostly. Now they all sound like their true selves, gangsters.
We all knew they were bringing this to a head. Let’s see where they’re leading us, and hopefully there’s a move we can make that they can’t turn to their advantage.