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I wrote this in
early November. A US District Court decision yesterday (Dec 16, 2013) found that parts of the
NSA’s mass data gathering are unconstitutional. It’s a small
victory but a step in the right direction. In light of this decision, this
article takes on renewed importance.
Before the Edward Snowden story broke, I watched a
movie about East Germany. It was set in the time when East Germany was a
communist dictatorship walled off from the world, like a huge maximum-security
prison. The Lives of Others is a
gripping drama that shows what that life was like. To say it was
dehumanizing, that there was no justice, that people lived
in constant terror of the secret police—the Stasi—does not
even begin to describe it. For example, the Stasi had forensic information on
every typewriter in the country. They could find the author of anything they
didn’t like, and disappear him.
See the movie. By the way, the lead actor was hated
in East Germany after the movie came out. Even years after communism
collapsed, many of its victims are so scarred that they would prefer to blank
it out. This is testimony to how horrific it was.
I normally write about gold and economics, but
Edward Snowden has brought to the attention of America—and the whole
world—a different issue. We advocates of the gold standard are, at
root, fighting for freedom. So we should pay attention to this front in the
same battle. There are many similarities with the fight for a free market in
money, the unadulterated gold standard.
One of them is that the old notions of
“liberal” and “conservative” seem almost
inapplicable. It used to be that “conservatives” in the U.S. were
in favor of more freedom and less government, at least nominally. But today,
that’s not necessarily so. Wall Street is generally
“conservative” and they are for a central bank, and its endless
acts of Quantitative Easing.
Similarly, Republicans and
“conservatives” are now coming out in favor of the National
Security Agency, and defending its spying on American citizens. They do this
in the wake of pervasive abuses that Snowden has disclosed. The Stasi could
never have dreamed of some of the capabilities used against every American
every day by the NSA, such as mass scanning of emails and phone calls, much
less automatically building a list of contacts for each citizen or tracking
everyone’s whereabouts in realtime.
Support for the NSA fits with conservatives’
strong support for “homeland security”. This term has been
completely perverted, in a way that would make George Orwell proud. It is now
about subjecting citizen-serfs to every conceivable inconvenience and
intrusion, especially when they dare to travel by airplane, talk on the phone,
send an email, get health care, or pay taxes. Instead of protecting the
rights of the people, security agencies now exist to attack them.
Those who would defend the security establishment
and the nascent police state may be “conservative” but they are
no friends of man’s rights or of freedom. Some are blind ideologues, others
are ignorant dupes, and many are just profiteering government contractors. It doesn’t
matter; they are defending the indefensible.
It is shocking that people who grew up in a free country
would staunchly support “fundamentally transforming” America into
tyranny. And that’s what it’s about, tyranny and ultimately
murder. There is no other reason to build a surveillance machine capable of
watching everyone constantly, a healthcare system in which government
bureaucrats make every life or death decision, a tax agency that knows what
you think and who you voted for—and a militarized police force.
It’s a good thing that information disclosed
by Edward Snowden has roiled the American electorate. He just may have gotten
through to people with a wake-up call. I
hope it is in time to change course.
The fight against surveillance, censorship, and
pseudo-security has another similarity with the fight against fiat currency.
If we lose the battle, it’s lights out. Our civilization will collapse into
a new Dark Age.
The fight for honest money is linked to the fight
against the police state. A police state will destroy the productivity that
still props up the debt that backs the dollar. Alternatively, a dollar
collapse will drive desperate, hungry people into the streets. This would
provide cover for a crackdown and dictatorship.
Liberty had better achieve victory on both fronts!
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