perfidy

Again, the boys and girls at Reason have hit one out of the park. Julian Sanchez has a long piece which asks the right questions of those who defend the USA-PATRIOT Act against all criticism.

Read the entire article, but I extract this nugget of wisdom for you:

The broadest thing wrong with this standard, [namely, Rich Lowry's assertion that "The challenge to critics should be this: Name one civil liberty that has been violated under the Patriot Act"] though, is where it places the burden of proof. Civil libertarians want the answer to questions that as yet have barely been asked and never been answered: How will these new powers make us safer? Would they have prevented the September 11 attacks? Do they add anything to the existing powers the government failed to deploy effectively before then? Are they broader than necessary to aid in the fight against terror?

The PATRIOT apologists will have none of this. The default, as they see it, is to grant new powers unless there's proof that they'll lead overnight to tyranny. The presumption of liberty is replaced by a presumption of power. The sad reality, though, is that even a police state can't guarantee total safety: Whatever we do, the coming years will see more terror, more attacks. If we conclude, each time, that the culprit must be an excess of domestic freedom, a lack of government power, we are traveling a road with no end.

There's a fatalistic note to this conclusion that I don't love, but Sanchez' broad point hits the spot. The Federal Government exists at the convenience of the American People; indeed the Constitution focuses on delimiting exactly which areas the Feds are empowered to act in, leaving the rest to, who, again? Consequently, any Act that purports to increase the power of the Fed, especially along police-state lines, ought to be met with the strictest scrutiny.

Ultimately, Rich Lowry's approach amounts to patriotic cravenness, a blind apron-clinging trust that the Government would never(!) do anything that could harm us. Sanchez argues for a much clearer-headed, innately American way to approach the question of balancing liberty with security. Despite what you sometimes hear nowadays, a good patriot is a skeptic.