But then they had to backtrack: Kentucky Marketplace: ‘WARNING: No Explicit or Implicit Expectation of Privacy’
Also interesting: China employs more than 2 million people… just to monitor the Internet
Is government power benign, malevolent, or neither? I tend to think that concentrated power is dangerous, regardless of its intentions or of whether it is elected or not. Those who pursue power tend to want more. People like Colbert King see nothing but benevolence. He thinks I am a bad sort of rebel (maybe I am a rebel in opposition to either slavery or serfdom) and doesn't even consider the case for freedom or the dangers of power.
Dan Greenberg gets it:
We confront the Great Solvers of the Human Problem who are determined to rearrange everyone to their liking. They began by controlling everything that people did. Now, they have moved on to controlling what people don't do. If you live, if you breathe, if you stir, move your muscles, track moving objects with your eyes, then there are obligations imposed on you.
ObamaCare is one of the final declarations that there is no opting out. Even if you don't drive, own a home, own a business, own a dog, or do one of the infinite things that bring you into mandatory contact with the apparatus of your government, you are committed to a task from maturity to death. Your mission is to obtain health insurance, and, in a system in which you become the ward of the government as soon as you taste air, it is the price that you pay for being alive.
In a free country, you are not obligated to do things simply for the privilege of breathing oxygen north of the Rio Grande and south of Niagara Falls.
Some people seem content with being subjects of a potent parental State which they trust will be filled with wisdom and care. Some (the aspiring adults, in my view) do not. There is a division there. It seems partly psychological. Old John Dean recently commented somewhere that he had become a Dem because Conservatives were the authoritarian party. I think he has it backwards, but he always did.
Nixon was a neo-Liberal. Goldwater was a good guy, as I read my recent history, a Don Quixote or a voice crying in the wilderness.
