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Sunday, October 03, 2004
Trust In Government…?
The silliest thing Dick Cheney has ever said was a couple of weeks after 9/11: ‘One of the things that’s changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government — big shift — and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do.’
Really? I’d say 9/11 vindicated perfectly a decentralised, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government — the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped — big-time, as the Vice-President would say — was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms. Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the US border at Derby Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he’d been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers.
On the other hand, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, amazon.com would know that he’d bought The Dummy’s Guide to Martyrdom Operations two years ago and their ‘We have some suggestions for you!’ box would be proffering a 30 per cent discount on The A-Z of Infidel Slaying and 72 Hot Love Tips That Will Have Your Virgins Panting For More. Amazon is a more efficient miner of information than US Immigration.
Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon’s system is very cheap, but it’s in the nature of government to do things worse, and slower. To take another example from September 11, on three planes the crew and passengers followed Federal Aviation Administration procedures largely unchanged from the Seventies and they all died, along with thousands of other people; on the fourth plane, Flight 93, they used their cellphones, discovered that FAA regulations weren’t going to save them, and then acted as free-born citizens, rising up against the terrorists and, at the cost of their own lives, preventing that flight carrying on to its target in Washington. On a morning when big government failed, the only good news came from private citizens.
We are blessed to have this man thinking and writing in our time. Nobody does it better.
A collateral point that Steyn could have elided here is that very few Americans view government as a monolith. The military, the police and the courts are regarded as separate manifestations of the protective mechanisms of society. More significant, they’re considered on a separate plane from the rest of the coercive edifice: “above” in importance, “below,” meaning more fundamental to our stability and security, in structural terms. With-but-after the police would come the unarmed emergency responders: firemen, ambulance services, and comparable workers and agencies. But a long, long way down from all of the above would be the routiniers of the bureaucracy whose mission in life is to write public-school sex education syllabuses, enforce diversity-in-hiring quotas, or fine homeowners for having too high a fence. And infinitely further down are the myrmidons of the ATF and DEA, who’ve demonstrated a willingness to slay and spare not to prevent Americans from exercising ownership rights over their own bodies or their Constitutionally guaranteed right to own and carry whatever weapons they please. I could go on, but surely the point has been made.
Because we decompose government into necessary, discretionary, and disgusting components, we are capable of lauding it where it functions well, deriding it where it makes an ass of itself, and condemning it where it trespasses upon the prerogatives of individuals and destroys the blessings of liberty.
Nor can one rationalize the irrational or defend the indefensible by saying “this is the way it’s always been.” That which is wrong must be undone and prevented from recurring, even if the majority endorses it and is comfortable with it.
Folks on a campaign against those of us who style ourselves libertarians should invest a few moments’ thought in that.
Comments
Probably the most egregious government agency to fail was the US Congress. It has legislative oversight of all of the alphabet agencies. It’s oversight seems to consist mostly of penurous support of the operating subfunctions and ridiculous legislative restrictions on the exercise of the primary duties of the agencies, witness their restrictions on the CIA hiring unsavory sources and operatives. This effectively hamstrung the HUMINT effort at possibly the worst time in our history.
So deeply has PC imbeded itself in the Congress that their hate and fear of firearms cause them to infringe on the Constitution in empowering the ATF.
The Congress is probably more responsible for the failures leading up to 9/11 than any other single government entity.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 10/03/2004 at 08:53 PM
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