Swickard: Reasoning with an unreasonable government

© 2013 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. Be reasonable. That is a common desire in our society. We wish to be surrounded by reasonable people and to have a reasonable government to protect us from unreasonable people. The problem is when the government itself becomes that which we cannot stand: when the government becomes unreasonable. Then we citizens have a problem.
     From the moment of our founding, this country has been haunted by the specter of totalitarian rule. The Constitution was carefully crafted to protect American Citizens from the urges of power-hungry leaders. Over the decades, little by little, power-hungry leaders have dismantled those protections. Most of these actions came with the promise of some reward for citizens foregoing their protections from governments taking their freedoms.
     It started when the government started doing things for people who wanted things they did not have. There is an impulse to get something from the government to which we do not own. Part of this involves protecting us from the human emotion of want.
     Most of the time the trade of our freedoms to satisfy some of our wants is above-board so that anyone who wishes to know can know the trade that has been made. The government steps in to give us our wants if we give the government their want of power. The accumulation of power requires us to surrender our freedoms. We know where people want to start in having the government do things. The quest is to know when they, whoever they are, have gone too far.

     And the loss of our freedoms is still not enough for our government. The end-game is most certainly a total dictatorship. The loss of freedom is never all at once, it is always incremental. It is always “reasonable” until it becomes unreasonable.
     Having an all-powerful government watching the communications of every citizen without any presumption of doing something wrong is the road to ruin for our society. Do we have any servants left or are we the servants to the government? Time will tell. Read full column

Swickard: Reasoning with an unreasonable government