Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, June 10, 2019

Unreasonable

When the Constitution was written, the primary malefactor towards human liberty was monarchical authoritarianism. If it wasn't a king, it was the specter of Bonaparte looming over discussions of freedom. Madison and others observed that chaos could lead to a strongman, so a system of government was made to allow government to function, but strictly limited what it was able to do.

After the Civil War, many reformers noted that corporations and trusts were limiting human freedom. This lead to the Progressive Era and the New Deal reforms that sought to balance their power with the state.

Today, we live in a New Gilded Age and we are increasingly ceding our liberty to corporations. We allow Google and Amazon to wiretap our homes and track our online selves. We give up privacy for the sake of convenience. And then some company loses our data and we scramble to adapt.

There's a coming catastrophe in privacy rights.  Again, referring to Madison: Where the ability to do wrong exists, wrong will be done. Someone will take this too far.  

Hopefully we will be awake enough to the dangers and hopefully we will have leadership that is awake enough to our demands.

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