Government Intrusion Quotes

The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble.

These people were content with their environment, and felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and organizations, and if anything welcoming these intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of 20th century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed. Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later.

intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When

I believe individuals have a right to life and liberty and that physical aggression should be used only defensively. We should respect each other as rational beings by trying to achieve our goals through reason and persuasion rather than threats and coercion. That, and not a desire for “economic efficiency,” is the primary moral reason for opposing government intrusions into our lives: government is force, not reason. People

Look for a candidate who can do to the electorate what corporations are learning to do, so Government—or, better, Big Government, Big Brother, Intrusive Government—becomes the image against which this candidate defines himself. Though

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland observes that Britain ‘has a fundamentally different conception of power to, say, the United States’. It doesn’t have a Bill of Rights or a written constitution, or the American idea that ‘we the people’ are sovereign. Rather, the British system still bears the ‘imprint of its origins in monarchy’, with power emanating from the top and flowing downwards. Britons remain subjects rather than citizens. Hence their lack of response towards government intrusion.

I am a small-government person, and I greatly oppose government intrusion into everything. Still, it is essential that we distinguish between those things that are important and those things that are just intruding upon our basic privacy. Whether to participate in childhood immunizations would be an individual choice if individuals were the only ones affected, but as previously mentioned, our children are part of our larger community. None of us lives in isolation. Your decision does not affect only you — it also affects your fellow Americans.

How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined?

Pretending as a matter of law that men and women are interchangeable, that “monogamish” relationships work just as well as monogamous relationships, that “throuples” are the same as couples, and that “wedlease” is preferable to wedlock will only lead to more broken homes, more broken hearts, and more intrusive government. Americans should reject such revisionism and work to restore the essentials that make marriage so important for societal welfare: sexual complementarity, monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence.

[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do–that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing. Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens–especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints–are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views.

According to an original reading of the Constitution and Declaration, the intrusiveness that is an inevitable part of big government is an offense against its people.

The intrusion of the government into our lives is pervasive. Where do we make a stand? I’m making mine right here.

Yet despite the enormous cost of these measures, despite their intrusion on our civil liberties, none of them been shown to slow the spread of Covid.

Our government has slowly morphed into a tyrannical beast, in some regards more intrusive than the British Empire was at the beginning of our Revolutionary War.

This power became addicting to many elected officials who, instead of going to Washington, DC, for a brief time to represent their constituency, wanted to hold their positions for extended periods of time — even for life. This growing power and the progressive intrusion of government into the lives of the people was so insidious that it went largely undetected.

The idea of freedom is complex and it is all-encompassing. It’s the idea that the economy must remain free of government persuasion. It’s the idea that the press must operate without government intrusion. And it’s the idea that the emails and phone records of Americans should remain free from government search and seizure. It’s the idea that parents must be the decision makers in regards to their children's education — not some government bureaucrat. But most importantly, it is the idea that the individual must be free to pursue his or her own happiness free from government dependence and free from government control. Because to be truly free is to be reliant on no one other than the author of our destiny. These are the ideas at the core of the Republican Party, and it is why I am a Republican. So my brothers and sisters of the American community, please join with me today in abandoning the government plantation and the Party of disappointment. So that we may all echo the words of one Republican leader who famously said, "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The

The promise of a "government" that would be a servant of the people, protecting their rights but otherwise leaving them in peace, grew into the largest, most powerful authoritarian empire the world has ever known, including the largest and most intrusive extortion racket ever known, the largest and most powerful war machine in history, and the most intrusive and invasive bureaucracy in history.

The protection guaranteed by the Amendments is much broader in scope. The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth. [Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]

And it is also immaterial that the intrusion was in aid of law enforcement. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. —John Lanchester

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

Many cyberweapons manufacturers sell hacking tools to governments worldwide. For example, FinFisher is an “offensive IT Intrusion solution,” according to the promotional material from the UK and German company that makes it, Gamma Group.

Unfortunately, the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government have become increasingly concerned with their image and their political parties, have drifted away from strict interpretations of the Constitution, and have substituted their own ideologies for the original vision. As a result, our government produces massively complicated taxation schemes, impossibly intricate and uninterpretable health care laws, and other intrusive measures instead of being a watchful guardian of our rights. Instead of providing an environment that allows diligent people to thrive on the basis of their own hard work and entrepreneurship, our government has taken on the role of trying to care for everyone’s needs and redistributing the fruits of everyone’s labors in a way consistent with its own ideology.

What the hell are you proud of? Proud to live in the country with the most intrusive, obnoxious, abusive tax collectors in the world? Proud to live in a country that has a higher percentage of people in prison than any other country in the world? Proud to be ruled by a government that has started and perpetuated more military conflicts in more areas of the world than any other in history? Proud to live in a country where the politicians and bankers have seen to it that you, your children, and your children’s children will forever be their indentured servants, to be forever herded and fleeced like sheep? Proud to live in a country where the biggest slimeballs on the planet tell you what you can eat, what you can drink, what you can drive, what you can build, where you can work, what you can produce, and what you can think?

For the left, employers were the exploiters. The New Right replied that the true exploiters were federal bureaucrats grasping for tax dollars, and the media elites who shoved 1960s libertinism down Middle America’s throats. New Rightists were obsessed with what were known as the “social issues”—crime, government intrusion into family life, sexual mores, the right to own a gun. Reagan’s establishmentarian presidential campaign manager John Sears dismissed them as the “emotional issues.” But the New Right reveled in emotion—particularly, the emotion of resentment.

Private sector networks in the United States, networks operated by civilian U.S. government agencies, and unclassified U.S. military and intelligence agency networks increasingly are experiencing cyber intrusions and attacks,” said a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report to Congress that was published the same month Conficker appeared. “. . . Networks connected to the Internet are vulnerable even if protected with hardware and software firewalls and other security mechanisms. The government, military, businesses and economic institutions, key infrastructure elements, and the population at large of the United States are completely dependent on the Internet. Internet-connected networks operate the national electric grid and distribution systems for fuel. Municipal water treatment and waste treatment facilities are controlled through such systems. Other critical networks include the air traffic control system, the system linking the nation’s financial institutions, and the payment systems for Social Security and other government assistance on which many individuals and the overall economy depend. A successful attack on these Internet-connected networks could paralyze the United States [emphasis added].

The Constitution became even more acceptable to the public at large after the first Congress, responding to criticism, passed a series of amendments known as the Bill of Rights. These amendments seemed to make the new government a guardian of people’s liberties: to speak, to publish, to worship, to petition, to assemble, to be tried fairly, to be secure at home against official intrusion. It was, therefore, perfectly designed to build popular backing for the new government. What was not made clear—it was a time when the language of freedom was new and its reality untested—was the shakiness of anyone’s liberty when entrusted to a government of the rich and powerful.

There is a lot of talk about "rigged games" as of late. Big government is the most insipid of all "rigged games". There is no choice available to the public allowing it to avoid a big over-arching government. You can always chose not do business with a big corporation. Corporations that are distasteful can be avoided. A big, powerful, government bent on intrusion cannot be avoided.

Outlawing subliminals would not necessarily undo generations of conditioning caused by high tech advertisements, anyway,” I added. “It may be that intrusive disruption of conscious thought through such advertisements every eight to twelve minutes has contributed to the rise in Attention Deficit Disorder. Combined with video games, our kids have grown up in a culture of constant subconscious bombardment that disrupts conscious thought. This is a possibility worth looking into. Again, raising awareness is key.

And it is also immaterial that the intrusion was in aid of law enforcement. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting), overruled by Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967).

Most American ideas were a part of the great tradition of the eighteenth-century common-wealthmen, the radical Whig ideology that arose from a series of upheavals in seventeenth-century England—the Civil War, the exclusion crisis of 1679–81, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Broadly speaking, this Whig theory described two sorts of threats to political freedom: a general moral decay of the people which would invite the intrusion of evil and despotic rulers, and the encroachment of executive authority upon the legislature, the attempt that power always made to subdue the liberty protected by mixed government.

A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake. Perhaps the recent incidents represented a last attempt by Wilder and the airline pilots to rebel against this unfolding logic? Sadly, they had little chance of success, precisely because their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed. Alternatively,

As income and wealth have concentrated at the top, political power has moved there as well. Money and power are inextricably linked. And with power has come influence over the market mechanism. The invisible hand of the marketplace is connected to a wealthy and muscular arm. It is perhaps no accident that those who argue most vehemently on behalf of an immutable and rational “free market” and against government “intrusion” are often the same people who exert disproportionate influence over the market mechanism. They champion “free enterprise” and equate the “free market” with liberty while quietly altering the rules of the game to their own advantage. They extol freedom without acknowledging the growing imbalance of power in our society that’s eroding the freedoms of most people.

Although the US State Department has not officially designated the MB [Muslin Brotherhood] as a terrorist organization, Egypt did so in 2013; and in 2015, a British government review “concluded that membership of or links to it should be considered a possible indicator of extremism.” However, in 2003 the FBI uncovered the MB’s multifaceted plan to dominate America through immigration, intimidation, education, community centers, mosques, political legitimacy, and establishing ‘interfaith dialogue’ centers in our universities and colleges. A document confiscated by the FBI outlines a twelve-point strategy to establish an Islamic government on earth that is brought about by a flexible, long-term ‘cultural invasion’ of the West. Their own plans teach us that ‘the intrusion of Islam will erupt in multiple locations using mulciple means’. But near the top of this strategy is immigration. To be more specific, the first major point in their strategy states; ‘To expand the Muslin presence by birth rate, immigration and refusal to assimilate.’ This strategy transformed Indonesia from a Buddhist and Hindu country to the largest Muslin-dominated country in the world. As Europe has discovered, open borders for refugees may be viewed as a compassionate response to a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, but it has long-term risks and consequences.

And there was a deeper, less visible effect of the Truman loyalty program. Seeing its consequences for certain individuals and fearing its intrusion on their own lives, many in the government sought protection by strongly asserting their anti-Communism. In the public action that ensued, policy was based not on reality but, instinctively or deliberately, on personal caution...Those who urged a militant and sometimes military anti-Communism were considered sound, trustworthy and personally safe; those who questioned such a course were politically unsafe, possible even slightly disloyal.

the state looms large in all our lives, not only in its intrusions but in our thoughts: for so thoroughly have we drunk at the wells of collectivism that we see the state always as the solution to any problem, never as an obstacle to be overcome. One can gauge how completely collectivism has entered our soul – so that we are now a people of the government, for the government, by the government – by a strange but characteristic British locution.

I had learned that some people feel that books are "intrusive," in the sense that books put things in their heads that they don't want there. Some people call these things "ideas." Maybe they're right. Sometimes these ideas sprout into what are known as "thoughts," and you know my feelings about school, government, and big businesses--thoughts are the last things they want rattling around inside people's heads because thoughts inevitably lead to consumer protection, free speech and hippies.

Fourth Amendment reasonableness balances the advancement of government interests against the intrusion of the government’s acts. An officer should only be permitted to invoke a legal standard based on a different government’s interests when that government has recognized that enforcement as genuine and legitimate. Permitting cross-enforcement without authorization would permit an officer to piggyback on government interests that his searches and seizures are unlikely to advance. Authorization provides the best signal that an officer’s conduct genuinely advances the government interests used that justify it. When a government is silent on who can enforce its laws, questions of constitutional history and structure justify different presumptions. State officers should be allowed to search or seize to enforce federal criminal laws unless Congress has forbidden it. On the other hand, federal officers should not be allowed to search or seize to enforce state law unless state statutory or caselaw affirmatively allows it.

Because whites only poorly understood that decentralized arrangement, they eventually forced the notion of a single tribal chief upon the Indians. Prior to Euro-American intrusion, the Nez Perces had a permanent governing council, a political organization that could speak for all of them, but they had no head chief empowered to sign away their lands in treaties.

Another reason for people running autistic advocacy groups to get on autism registries is because the need for autistic rights groups is diminishing in light of national healthcare systems increasingly becoming more hands on (some say intrusive) in people's lives. It has already been determined by most governments who is getting what in terms of medical care, and while people can petition for more, it is doubtful they will receive much given that there is only a finite amount of funds available which must be distributed to everyone. But if a person can get into the existing pool, at least they can get a cut of “what's due them,” even if they aren't really autistic. It's

The Fourth Amendment protects people, not property, the Court stressed. A person’s Fourth Amendment rights do not depend on where he or she is at the time of the government intrusion, nor on whether a physical trespass occurs.

Politicians are . . . politicians. It is the nature of government to become more intrusive, more controlling of people’s lives and their property. Yours, ours now, perhaps less than many others. But who knows what the future may hold?

[Therefore, the greatest contribution that Indigenous peoples may be able to make at this time is to continue providing the world with living models of sustainability that are rooted in ancient wisdom and that inform us how to live in balance with all of our relations on Mother Earth. This will require nonIndigenous people to stand with us and ensure that our lands, waters, and ways of life are not further eroded by government and industrial intrusion.]

In the current technological era we are more vulnerable to manipulation via confirmation bias than ever. Take the YouTube algorithm. It recommends videos to you on the basis of those you’ve already watched by analyzing the viewing habits of people who clicked on the same video. It predicts that you are more likely to enjoy their favorite content than a completely random selection of videos, which turns out to be a fair assumption. The trouble is, there are concerns that it can have the effect of plunging the viewer into a confirmation bias odyssey. If you watched a video about aliens visiting rural America and intrusively probing local farmhands, then you are fairly likely to be interested in other bonkers conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat, and that vaccines cause autism. Before long, you may find yourself presented with videos of people telling you that school shootings in the US were faked, and that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers were perpetrated by the US government. People who believe such things are more likely to distrust the government anyway, and to be on the political right. In the run-up to the US presidential election in 2016, virulently anti-Hillary Clinton videos were viewed six times more than anti-Donald Trump videos.

This was the kind of Business Roundtable chump who spent his lunchtime decrying government intrusion and now found himself on a cell phone in the middle of the night pleading with the government to save him. In

At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them. What we get in return for the government’s intrusion is less straightforward.

think Collins is going down in defeat due to his inept handling of the economy, even more intrusive government regulations, and letting other countries dictate to the United States what we should be doing. It’s apparent he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism or the American Dream, and he seems to think we’re just another country. Through the mainstream media, his underlings constantly attack Conservatives and Independents without regard to the facts; it’s all about feelings for them. I was treated to the same kind of vitriol when his people took me down.

NOTE: The political spectrum, known as right and left, is in actuality being purposely manipulated. The fact is that the essence of freedom lies in the proper limitation of government. Indisputably, throughout history no source has proven itself more deadly and destructive than the authority invested in government. While this is general knowledge to those who enthusiastically advocate freedoms, most, unfortunately, are uninformed. Accordingly, this creates the perfect environment for deception. Indeed, an accurate political spectrum from right to left would undeniably begin with “freedom” (e.g., non-intrusive government, self-sovereignty, and self-determination), defined by “little or no government control.” Thus, the political spectrum would end up on the left with “totalitarianism” (e.g., authoritarian dictatorial government, subjugation, and tyranny), defined by “unlimited government control.” In accordance, a correct paradigm would begin with ideals of “anarchy,” endorsing “no government.” Next would come the ideals of “libertarianism,” also known as “classical-liberalism,” endorsing “limited government.” Thereafter, would come “modern-liberalism,” also known as “social-liberalism,” endorsing “greater government.” Ultimately, the spectrum would end with the ideals of “fascism,” “socialism,” and “communism,” endorsing “totalitarian government.

Rush Limbaugh nailed it on his broadcast: “Obamacare is not about improved healthcare or cheaper insurance or better treatment or insuring the uninsured, and it never has been about that. It’s about statism. It’s about expanding the government. It’s about control over the population. It is about everything but healthcare.” Obamacare is just one part of the unwanted, unnecessary, unaffordable fundamental transformation of America hoisted upon us; its premise is unquestionable government control over a free people. Limbaugh’s message echoes that of early nineteenth-century minister William John Henry Boetcker: “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. . . . You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. . . . You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.” Good leaders understand that the ills of our economy and our society won’t be solved by a bigger, more intrusive government. The answer to restoring America is to restore her values of freedom, hard work, and individual initiative. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, get more informed about how big government is antithetical to America’s foundational principles. Work to elect leaders who promise (and then deliver!) to rein in government, repeal Obamacare, and return power to the people, who can make better decisions for themselves, their families, and their businesses than bureaucrats ever will.   DAY 92

As for our own age, Habermas speaks of “a refeudalization of the public sphere,” what with the fusion of news and advertising, the corporate ownership of media, the return of government secrecy, the intrusion of celebrity into politics,

abortion will continue. Many opponents claim to be taking the moral high ground. However, by depriving them of their civil rights, opposition to abortion hurts women and is thus unethical. It condemns women to mandatory motherhood. This attitude is not new. The systematic maltreatment of women has been institutionalized by governments and religions for several millennia.56 57 58 The clarity and cogency of the argument against abortion should be sufficient to sway public opinion. However, over the past four decades, this has not been the case. Opponents of abortion have resorted to eight murders,59,60 arson, firebombing,61 intimidation of women and clinicians,62 governmental intrusion into the physician-patient relationship,63 imposition of obstacles that deter and delay abortion, and increased costs.64,65 A broad campaign of deception and chicanery, including crisis pregnancy centers and disinformation sites on the Internet,66 has influenced decisions about abortion and its safety. Without the smokescreen about abortion safety, the ongoing attack on women and health care providers might be recognized for what it is: misogyny directed against our wives, sisters, and daughters. Ironically, the same political conservatives who oppose “big government” and its interference in our daily lives are sponsoring anti-abortion legislation mandating more intrusion of government into the private lives—and bodies—of American women. While the ethical dimensions of abortion will continue to be debated, the medical science is incontrovertible: legal abortion has been a resounding public-health success.18,19 The development of antibiotics, immunization, modern contraception, and legalized abortion all stand out as landmark public-health achievements of the Twentieth Century.

A government that thinks it can remedy personal failure is an intrusion in everybody’s life. No law is going to cure a human’s lack of physical or mental effectiveness. I’d rather see democracy promote strength than reward weakness.

The Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives, may still technically be law but they have been judicially abolished. The Fourth Amendment was written in 1789 in direct response to the arbitrary and unchecked search powers that the British had exercised through general warrants called “writs of assistance”, which played a significant part in fomenting the American Revolution. The amendment limits the sate’s ability to search and seize to a specific place, time, and event approved by a magistrate. It is impossible to square the bluntness of the Fourth Amendment with the arbitrary search and seizure of all our personal communications.

There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as an unintended consequence of a number of liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Slum clearance uprooted and destroyed many of the social networks that existed in poor neighborhoods, replacing them with an anonymous and increasingly dangerous existence in high-rise public housing units. “Good government” drives eliminated the political machines that at one time governed most large American cities. The old, ethnically based machines were often highly corrupt, but they served as a source of local empowerment and community for their clients. In subsequent years, the most important political action would take place not in the local community but at higher and higher levels of state and federal government. A second factor had to do with the expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal on, which tended to make federal, state, and local governments responsible for many social welfare functions that had previously been under the purview of civil society. The original argument for the expansion of state responsibilities to include social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, training, and the like was that the organic communities of preindustrial society that had previously provided these services were no longer capable of doing so as a result of industrialization, urbanization, decline of extended families, and related phenomena. But it proved to be the case that the growth of the welfare state accelerated the decline of those very communal institutions that it was designed to supplement. Welfare dependency in the United States is only the most prominent example: Aid to Familles with Dependent Children, the depression-era legislation that was designed to help widows and single mothers over the transition as they reestablished their lives and families, became the mechanism that permitted entire inner-city populations to raise children without the benefit of fathers. The rise of the welfare state cannot be more than a partial explanation for the decline of community, however. Many European societies have much more extensive welfare states than the United States; while nuclear families have broken down there as well, there is a much lower level of extreme social pathology. A more serious threat to community has come, it would seem, from the vast expansion in the number and scope of rights to which Americans believe they are entitled, and the “rights culture” this produces. Rights-based individualism is deeply embedded in American political theory and constitutional law. One might argue, in fact, that the fundamental tendency of American institutions is to promote an ever-increasing degree of individualism. We have seen repeatedly that communities tend to be intolerant of outsiders in proportion to their internal cohesiveness, because the very strength of the principles that bind members together exclude those that do not share them. Many of the strong communal structures in the United States at midcentury discriminated in a variety of ways: country clubs that served as networking sites for business executives did not allow Jews, blacks, or women to join; church-run schools that taught strong moral values did not permit children of other denominations to enroll; charitable organizations provided services for only certain groups of people and tried to impose intrusive rules of behavior on their clients. The exclusiveness of these communities conflicted with the principle of equal rights, and the state increasingly took the side of those excluded against these communal organizations.

an intrusive government of the politically self-righteous,

No doubt, some of the champions of local government hoped to preserve such unsavory local customs as slavery or the local rule of a small group of privileged men, but many of the defenders of local government argued honestly that the states presented the best hope of securing liberty. Liberty, in the eighteenth century, meant not simply liberty from some intrusive outside power. It meant the active exercise of control over one’s life, the possession of power in one’s own hands. It meant government small enough and close enough to home to be directly accountable and responsive. It meant self-government, not government handed over to some remote rulers. Strictly understood, the principle of local self-government meant a share of power more or less equal to everyone else’s share of power, a citizenry more or less equal in wealth and status, not one dominated by one small group or another; that is to say, it meant democracy

I argue that a right of exit is important in order to limit government power. I sometimes think that what kept the U.S. government small in the early 19th century was not so much the Constitution as the fact that people kept leaving the then-current United States for adjacent territories. The option to exit would have made it quite difficult for government to grow large and intrusive.

In the United States, those with power and resources rarely directly bribe public officials in order to receive specific and visible favors, such as advantageous government contracts. Instead, they make campaign contributions and occasionally hold out the promise of lucrative jobs at the end of government careers. And the most valuable things they get in exchange are market rules that seem to apply to everyone and appear to be neutral, but that systematically and disproportionately benefit them. To state the matter another way, it is not the unique and perceptible government “intrusions” into the market that have the greatest effect on who wins and who loses; it is the way government organizes the market. Power

When the government becomes large and intrusive and feels that it has the right to as much of the resources owned by the people as it wants, then we have clearly strayed away from some of the foundational principles of this nation.

The makers of our Constitution were not a congregation of religious enthusiasts. If they protected religion from the intrusive propensities of all government and its functionaries, it was not because they loved churches and doctrines. It was because they loved freedom, and hated tyranny, especially tyranny over the mind. They knew that religion cannot exist except in a mind. The First Amendment protects not churches, but individuals, minds. It affirms that the inner life of individuals is none of government’s damned business.

The Web has become critical to all of our lives as well as the world economy, and yet the decisions on how it is designed have never been voted upon by anyone. Those decisions were made by engineers and executives at Google, Facebook, and Amazon (plus a few others) and imposed upon the public with no regulatory scrutiny. The result is what President Obama calls “a Wild West” world without privacy or security that leaves every citizen vulnerable to criminal, corporate, and government intrusion. As Obama wrote in The Economist, “a capitalism shaped by the few and unaccountable to the many is a threat to all.

Under this law, many government officials must ‘consent’ to being observed in the most intrusive way (phones tapped, homes bugged, emails read) for up to two full months each year, except that they won’t know which 60 days they are under surveillance. Perhaps they will imagine they are under surveillance all of the time. Perhaps that is the point. More than twenty years after Hungary left the world captured in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the surveillance state is back.

The 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-2017), which is a slightly older document, puts the mean number of years of schooling in India at 5.12 years, which is not very far off from the Human Development Report figure. This is well below other emerging-market countries, like China, at 8.17 years, and Brazil, at 7.54 years. In fact, it is also well below the average of all developing countries, which is at 7.09 years.

Government surveillance is a blatant violation of our fundamental right to privacy, an intrusion into the sacred space where personal thoughts and actions unfold. Beyond its legal ramifications, the emotional toll is profound, eroding the very fabric of trust that binds citizens to their government. This unwarranted scrutiny transforms society into a panopticon, where individuals feel perpetually observed, stifling genuine self-expression and fostering an atmosphere of fear. The notion that constant surveillance is necessary for security undermines the principles of democracy, as it sets a dangerous precedent, sacrificing essential liberties in the name of an elusive safety that comes at the cost of our collective freedom.

Government surveillance is a pernicious assault on the pillars of democracy, casting a long shadow over the emotional and psychological well-being of individuals subjected to constant monitoring. The damage inflicted is twofold: the erosion of privacy and the fracturing of trust. The emotional toll of surveillance is immeasurable, creating a culture of fear and self-censorship that stifles open expression. Historical instances, such as the misuse of surveillance by totalitarian regimes, provide stark warnings against the dangers of unchecked governmental intrusion into private lives. The unlawfulness of surveillance is not merely a legal matter; it is a call to protect the emotional sanctity of citizens and fortify the trust that is foundational to a healthy democratic society.

Forcing an entire population to accept an arbitrary and risky medical intervention is the most intrusive and demeaning action ever imposed by the United States Government, and perhaps any government. And it is based upon a lie. The Director of the CDC, Dr. Fauci, and the WHO have all had to reluctantly acknowledge that the vaccines cannot stop transmission. When Israel’s Director of Public Health addressed the FDA Advisory Panel, she left no doubt about the vaccines’ inability to stop transmission of the virus, or stop sickness, or stop death. Describing Israel’s situation as of September 17th, 2021, she said: Sixty percent of the people in severe and critical condition were, um, were immunized, doubly immunized, fully vaccinated. Forty-five percent of the people who died in this fourth wave were doubly vaccinated. Even so, three weeks later, on October 7th—just days before this book went to press—the President of the United States announced that he was ensuring healthcare workers are vaccinated, “because if you seek care at a healthcare facility, you should have the certainty that the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you.” The President just told Americans that being vaccinated provides “certainty” that vaccinated people are “protected from COVID and cannot pass it to you.” Not one question was posed to the President about this stunning disconnect, about the obvious untruth—and that speech gives us a stark example of what’s going on. A televised image of an unchallenged leader mouthing untrue pronouncements to mislead and control the population—that is the world of George Orwell’s sadly prophetic novel, 1984. It

The United States fends off millions of attempted cyber intrusions into military and other government networks each month.86 In 2015, hackers most likely acting at the behest of the Chinese government stole the highly classified security clearance information of twenty-two million Americans from the Office of Personnel Management.

In general, the Fascist and Nazi regimes had no serious difficulty establishing control over public services. They largely protected civil servants’ turf from party intrusion and left their professional identity intact. Civil servants were frequently in broad sympathy with fascist regimes’ biases for authority and order against parliament and the Left, and they appreciated enhanced freedom from legal restraint. Eliminating Jews sometimes opened up career advancement. The police were the key agency, of course. The German police were very quickly removed from the normative state and brought under Nazi Party control via the SS. Himmler, supported by Hitler against rivals and the Ministry of the Interior, which traditionally controlled the police, ascended in April 1933 from political police commander of Bavaria (where he set up the first concentration camp at Dachau) to chief of the whole German police system in June 1936. This process was facilitated by the disgruntlement many German police had felt for the Weimar Republic and its “coddling of criminals,” and by the regime’s efforts to enhance police prestige in the eyes of the public. By 1937, the annual congratulatory “Police Day” had expanded from one day to seven. Initially the SA were deputized as auxiliary Exercising Power police in Prussia, but this practice was ended on August 2, 1933, and the police faced no further threat of dilution from party militants. They enjoyed a privileged role above the law as the final arbiters of their own form of unlimited “police justice.” While the German police were run more directly by Nazi Party chiefs than any other traditional state agency, the Italian police remained headed by a civil servant, and their behavior was little more unprofessional or partisan than under previous governments. This is one of the most profound differences between the Nazi and Fascist regimes. The head of the Italian police for most of the Fascist period was the professional civil servant Arturo Bocchini. There was a political police, the OVRA, but the regime executed relatively few political enemies. Another crucial instrument of rule was the judiciary. Although very few judges were Nazi Party members in 1933, the German magistracy was already overwhelmingly conservative. It had established a solid track record of harsher penalties against communists than against Nazis during the 1920s. In exchange for a relatively limited invasion of their professional sphere by the party’s Special Courts and People’s Court, the judges willingly submerged their associations in a Nazi organization and happily accepted the powerful role the new regime gave them.71 The Italian judiciary was little changed, since political interference had already been the norm under the liberal monarchy. Italian judges felt general sympathy for the Fascist regime’s commitment to public order and national grandeur.

Keep in mind that virtually all the leading figures in this great debate were libertarians by today’s standards. They believed in liberty and limited government. Even the least libertarian among them would be horrified if he could see how later generations have ballooned the size and intrusiveness of the federal establishment. It never occurred to the most ardent Federalist that government should rob Peter to pay Paul for his health care, art work, alternative energy, prescription drugs, hurricane relief, or his notions of regime change in Somalia.

Oh, he’s a conservative? Well, it’s in the subtitle of this book. I figured out that’s exactly where my values lie: That I praise God and support Judeo Christian Values; Respect and believe in the promises of the American dream; Trust the free market and the spirit of the American entrepreneur; Reject the size, scope and intrusion of the Government in our lives; Believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility, Know that a democratic republic can produce Laws that secure equality And social justice

Before Roosevelt, the Federal Government hardly touched your life. Outside of the postmaster, there was little local representation. Now people you knew were appointed to government jobs. Joe Blow or some guy from the corner. “It came right down to Main Street. Half of them loved it, half of them hated it. There was the immediacy of its effect on you. In Aberdeen, Main Street was against it. But they were delighted to have those green relief checks cashed in their cash registers. They’d have been out of business had it not been for them. It was a split thing. They were cursing Roosevelt for the intrusion into their lives. At the same time, they were living off it. Main Street still has this fix.

The right level of analysis on Trump isn’t Trump at all, but the public that endowed him with a radical direction and temper, and the decadent institutions that proved too weak to stand in his way. The US public, like the public everywhere, is engaged in a long migration away from the structures of representative democracy to more sectarian arrangements. The public craves meaning and identity. From its perspective, late modern society, including government, exists to frustrate this desire. Caught in the collision between extraordinary personal expectations and feeble but intrusive political institutions, the nation-state, here and elsewhere, is splintering into sociopolitical shards that grow less intelligible to one another by the moment. To a Hillary Clinton, peering down from the heights of a very steep pyramid, the distant mass of Trump supporters could only look like “a basket of deplorables.” Otherwise they were impossible to explain.

At the same time that the IRA operation began to focus on supporting candidate Trump in early 2016, the Russian government employed a second form of interference: cyber intrusions (hacking) and releases of hacked materials damaging to the Clinton Campaign. The Russian intelligence service known as the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Army (GRU) carried out these operations.

The GOP, I discovered, was a religious, pro-Christian party. It held 'conservative' values and views regarding faith, family, and culture. It championed self-reliance and hard work. It believed that capitalism and the free market had quickly created the largest middle class in the history of civilization. It believed in individual freedoms and God-given rights over mob rule and intrusive government. It believed in the sanctity of law.

The trouble is, many Americans have come to believe there is no middle ground—no role for government services that might be “smart” rather than “big.” Government, in whatever form, has come to be seen as the enemy. In one recent poll a third of Americans even believed that an armed rebellion might be necessary to protect their liberties from government intrusion in the near future.

Not all Republicans showed such restraint. One day, Pete Rouse wandered into the Oval to show me media clips containing various remarks from Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, founder of the House Tea Party Caucus and an eventual Republican candidate for president. Bachmann had been decrying newfangled energy-efficient lightbulbs as an un-American “Big Brother intrusion” and a threat to public health; they also signaled what she declared to be a larger plot by Democrats to impose a radical “sustainability” agenda, in which all U.S. citizens would eventually be forced to “move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs.” “Looks like our secret is out, Mr. President,” Pete said. I nodded gravely. “Better hide the recycling bins.

Thus individuals and communities of all faiths, or of none, enjoy two basic rights. One is the right to an autonomous social existence, free of unwarranted suppression or intrusion by government or other social actors. The other is the right to full civic and political participation, equal to that of other citizens and social or political actors.

Historic intelligence failures such as Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001, have often been attributed to “failures of imagination.” The same could be said of the Russian attack on the 2016 presidential elections. Neither the U.S. government nor the media nor the public were prepared to grapple with a sweeping foreign intrusion into our fragile electoral system. The efforts by Steele and Fusion to raise the alarm initially struck many as wide-eyed paranoia.