A Man’s Home Is His Castle
Here’s the part that should most piss you off about John Doe’s National-Security Letter memoir in yesterday’s Post:
Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case — including the mere fact that I received an NSL — from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.
The government has taken the most intimate aspects of this man’s life from his own control. There is no part of his waking day untwisted by the injunctions of the Patriot Act, and probably little enough of his sleep. The man has been accused or convicted of no crime. This is tyranny. Not “the threat of” tyranny, not “practically” tyranny – the thing itself. It hasn’t directly touched me yet and it may not have touched you, but if it has already ensnared your neighbor you won’t even know.
Comment by laura —
March 24, 2007 @ 11:10 am
Please don’t take this as snark aimed at you guys: I am amazed that libertarians feel threatened by “mommy state liberals” when the pattern in our history so clearly shows that the worst threats to liberty consistantly come from thhe right. Bicycle helmet laws and smoking regulations are annoyinng, and hate crime laws are well intentioned mistakes, but they are not tyranny. For tyranny you need conservatives and Republicans.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 24, 2007 @ 12:07 pm
laura-
I get what you’re saying about how not all liberty violations are created equal, but I’d say that the difference is not really mommy state liberals vs. conservatives. The threat can come from a variety of directions or factions.
The drug war, which has been a pretext for an incredible amount of violence (and which will probably be the biggest beneficiary of the precedents set in the war on terror) could be considered a “Mommy state” program, since it’s about protecting you from yourself. And there are a lot of horror stories out there about people who got on the wrong side of the IRS.
I think it has more to do with the difference between a “war” mentality and the typical day to day bullshit of government regulation. There will always be bullshit rules and regulations that infringe liberty and create problems, and those who violate those rules will always face big trouble. But at the same time there will generally be a way to navigate the bullshit and get by OK, as long as it isn’t too steep.
OTOH, when they decide to “get tough” and “take the gloves off” then anybody who winds up in their crosshairs will be in a nightmare with no escape.
Transfat bans are ridiculous and uncalled for and should be opposed, but a substitute or loophole will be found and life will go on, as long as it’s something that they enforce via lifer bureaucrat inspectors with clipboards (and reserve the cops for the guys who keep resisting court orders or whatever). OTOH, if they declare War on Transfats and do no-knock raids and put gag orders on food distributors after confiscating customer lists, then it will go from bullshit as usual to tyranny.
Every government regulation is, of course, ultimately rooted in the prospect that guys with guns might show up on your doorstep. But the less dangerous regulations (in practice) are the ones that are easy to avoid and just involve bureaucratic bullshit if caught (with the armed men held in reserve for the really messy cases). The more dangerous ones are the ones where the men with guns are used as a first resort and aren’t kept on a leash.
Comment by adam s —
March 24, 2007 @ 4:34 pm
and apparently you need Democrats, too.
Comment by Steve —
March 24, 2007 @ 4:51 pm
Laura, I’m not a libertarian, nor do I play one on t.v., but let me follow up on Thoreau’s comment. I think that much of the libertarian animus towards mommy-state liberalism comes from the fact that both on a political level and a more social one, the mommy-statists are generally winning. (The percentage of bars where you can legally smoke, and the number of people inclined to bitch about it, creeps steadily downward, for instance.) And then there’s the stinking-of-patchouli effect that motivates the so-called “South Park libertarians”, where the fact that annoying holier-than-thou liberals like trans-fat bans but don’t like forcing a man to lie to his wife or go to jail means that one is clearly worse than the other.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 24, 2007 @ 6:41 pm
There’s another reason for the great animosity toward bullshit as usual from the nanny/regulatory state: On a daily basis, your typical person encounters the regulatory/nanny state far more frequently than the darker forces that constitute unmasked, unmitigated tyranny. At least for now. We don’t always notice it directly, because (as the Original Recipe Thoreau noted in “Civil Disobedience”) people and businesses are very good at working around it and living their lives and prospering despite state meddling (at least modest doses of state meddling). But every time you pay taxes (or have those taxes taken out of your paycheck) you are paying for that nanny/regulatory state. As well as the darker elements of the state.
So if libertarians sometimes seem (notice I said “seem”, since there’s at least one person who will take me to task for stereotyping) to take regulations and nannying just as seriously as the unmasked, unbridled tyranny of the police/surveillance state, it’s probably because while the later may be more dire for those affected by it, the former is a more ubiquitous presence (at least for now) and it’s about as expensive.
My fear is that if the leashes are not restored the darker elements will become ubiquitous as well.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 24, 2007 @ 6:47 pm
Of course, there are the purists who would say that any infringement of any liberty is tyranny plain and simple. But the rest of the libertarian movement consists of people who can recognize varying degrees of bad, but also recognize that a thousand paper cuts can cause just as much pain and bleeding as one really bad wound.
Of course, the multitude of paper cuts is only worthy of being top priority if the moer serious wounds are rare. But the more serious wounds are only rare if they are vigilantly guarded against…
Comment by laura —
March 24, 2007 @ 9:01 pm
I’m sorry that it took me so long to get back to the discussion.
When I wrote my comment I wasn’t thinking so of this blog in particular (although I did get the impression somewhere that this was a libertarian blog)as more a general reaction to discussions with libertarians (Andrew Olhmsted, for example) who, to my surprise, were more inclined to vote Republican than Democrat on the assumption that R’s believe in small governnment and D’s are “nanny staters.” I’m simplifying, of course.
Anyway the source of my surprise is the track record of Republican legislative and illegal governnment acts over say the last fifty years. Republican administrations have abused government power repeadedly in violation of the Bill of Righhts and it is thhe R’s (and some conservative D’s) who want to use the governnment to meddle in people’s sex lives or regulate access to information.
The drug war was innitiated in hysterical rightwing reaction to potsmoking hippies and has been supported by the right ever since. If the “War on Drugs” is ever ended, or at least put on the back burner, it won’t be by the lawnorder R’s.
It is true that regulations are sometimes cluumsy or ham-handed or unnecessary
but surely no one is going to argue thhat all regulations are bad. Discussions of regulations have to be specific to be worthwhile. However even this area I don’t see the R’s as better than D’s. Mostly R opposition to regulation is just selfishhness. For example there is a lot of bitching by people who work for timber commpanies about regulations on cutting of our trees on our public land, subsidized by our taxes! Well, screw the timber companies. If they don’t want to be regulated they can get the hell out of our National Forests. Another example: the local R party in my state is dominated by a building company executive (who lobbied for the firing of MacKay, one of the famous presecutors). He is always bitching about growth regulations. For example, on the island where I live people can’t subdivide to less than five acres and can’t put cement walls along beach fronts. in othher words they can’t put their short term self interests ahead of the long term interests of their neighbors. The R’s want to end the “excessive ” regulation but thhe regulationns protect my quality of life, my property values, and the sea life of thhe Souund. So the pattern with Republicanns is to be Big Governnment whhen it comes to private decisionns like sex, drugs, annd political opinions, but no government when it comes to limiting selfish or iresponisble behavior that impacts everybody. The D’s generally speaking arenn’t Big Governnment over things like sex, drugs, or thoughts and do want the government ot regulate in the public interest.
neithher is libertarian (not thhat I’m any expert on liertarianns), but D’s are less authoritarian.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
March 24, 2007 @ 9:11 pm
Laura, the worst threats to liberty come from the party in control of the executive. That’s because the executive controls the NSA, FBI, and CIA, and all the other alphabet-soup agencies. If the executive’s party also controls Congress, we’re extra screwed. If the executive is also a cocksure idiot, we’re in for a seriously bad time.
Go back and look up who was in favor of the Clipper chip and who was opposed. You will be surprised to discover that (for example) John Ashcroft was on the side of the angels on that one.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 24, 2007 @ 10:55 pm
laura and Steve: It dumbfounds me that your reaction when I write something you seem to agree with and even admire is to shit on me. It dumbfounds me even more if you don’t realize that’s what you’re doing.
Trackback by The Agitator —
March 25, 2007 @ 9:17 am
The Private Hell of an NSA Letter…
Bully to the Washington Post for publishing the anonymous op-ed by the lawyer who received one of the FBI’s national……
Comment by KCinDC —
March 25, 2007 @ 9:27 am
Laura, the drug war may be more popular among Republicans than among Democrats, but I haven’t seen the Democrats doing anything about ending it. In fact, I’d say it’s more likely that a law-and-order Republican could make progress on that front, since a Democrat is going to be afraid of the accusation of being soft on crime in the next election. It’s the same reason that only the Nixon, with his anticommmunist credentials, could go to China.
Comment by laura —
March 25, 2007 @ 11:36 am
KCin Dc You are right and that kind of thing drives me nuts. And yes, the party that controls the aparatus is in the best position to abuse power. But which party, when in control, has abused power the most over the last fifty years or so? I’m referring to violations of the Constitution or civil liberties–that kind of abuse of power. (The subject of regulatory functions is too complex for here). Jim, I am interested in an expanation of why you feel shat upon, but since I didn’t fire any poop at you intentionally or otherwise, I do not feel responisble for how you feel.
Humm..maybe you work for a timber company? Or maybe you want to subdivide fifty acres into fifty building lots with no responisbility for the consequences?
Trackback by Windypundit —
March 25, 2007 @ 12:07 pm
A Few Words from an NSL Recipient…
The Washington Post has a fascinating anonymous op-ed by someone who received a national security letter (NSL). These letters are demands for information by the FBI (or other agencies, I presume) that have not been approved by any court and which come …
Comment by Steve —
March 25, 2007 @ 6:41 pm
9 – I’m sorry you read it that way, Jim; I certainly don’t think of you or Radley Balko or Julian Sanchez as falling into that “South Park” category, which I didn’t intend to stand in for libertarians as a whole. I thought the fact that I wanted to set SPLs off as marked would have made that evident, but obviously not. There certainly are people motivated by the desire to hork off liberals; witness every third comment to one of Megan McArdle’s posts, or the glee a lot of reasonably sensible people seem to take in repeating denialist global warming points. If I was inept enough in my comment to make you think I was tarring you (and Balko and Sanchez, and even libertarians who I disagree with much more frequently) with the same brush as that buffoon Trey Parker, I offer my sincere apologies.
And I think the my explanation that mommy-statism is winning is correct but not complete (Thoreau’s comment in 6 seems more satisfactory if I wanted to give a single reductionist answer). Why is this surprising? It’s a very human response — the counterpart on the left would be the response to religiosity in the public sphere. There’s a huge amount of attention paid to, say, attempts to slip creationism into public schools, disproportionate, I think, to the actual level of importance it plays in American society.* I think a great deal of the reason a lot of lefty bloggers people talk more about religiosity than they do about, say, ending the drug war out of a combination of Thoreau’s point (people dislike things they’re ideologically opposed to but forced to come into contact with) and mine (people get excised about things they’re ideologically opposed to that the general public supports or doesn’t care about).
I don’t think that reaction makes PZ Meyers a bad person; why should I think it makes Sanchez a bad person to flip out when he can’t smoke at Kingpin or the Black Cat? I’m actually in a great deal of sympathy to that position (or seat belts, or trans fats, or underage drinking), much more so than I am with flatly stated economic classical liberalism (or freedom of association arguments defending red-lining, etc.).
* I say this as someone without any schoool-age children. I may someday think that creationism in the public schools is the WORST THING EVAR, worse than if President Larry the Cable Guy decided to nuke Iran and then Mexico, just for kicks.
Comment by mds —
March 26, 2007 @ 8:39 am
You will be surprised to discover that (for example) John Ashcroft was on the side of the angels on that one.
No, I wasn’t surprised by that, or by his essay about keeping the gummint’s hands off the Internet. Nor was I surprised that he jettisoned all such thinking the instant his party, including himself, controlled the executive. That’s really what grates me most about modern Republicans: simultaneously beating their breasts about liberty and small government, while creating an ever-more-authoritarian state. At least nanny-state liberals talk like nanny-state liberals. And many Congressional Democrats vote for Patriot Act renewal, the MCA, etc., out of political cowardice rather than the enthusiasm for unlimited executive power that still seems to grip Congressional Republicans (until a Democrat is President again).
I also think that if any breakthrough in thinking occurs in the so-called “War on Drugs,” it’s going to come from the Left before it comes from the Right. (Yeah, I know, “if”.) Again, I think cowardice plays more of a role on the liberal side, a fear of being seen as “soft” on drugs. And remember, the social conservatives that are the current Republican base make Democrats look like Libertarians on such issues.