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[thepennyking]

The Erosion of Rights

The natural progress of things is for Government to gain ground and for Liberty to yield.
--Thomas Jefferson


Rights do not disappear suddenly and noticeably, but slowly and often subtly. The price of democracy is eternal vigilance, but not all people are vigilant all the time, and most are willing to see various freedoms erode and even disappear. This is the unsurprising result of the usual weaknesses of human nature:

Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty.
--Thomas Jefferson, inscribed on the National Archives building


Fear drives people to consciously give up rights in exchange for security.

Apathy permits one group that does not value a particular freedom to stand by and watch while it is taken away from another group that does value it.

Out of Hate one group will actively try to oppress another and take away their rights.

Out of Selfishness one group will infringe on another's rights for their own economic benefit.

Ignorance lets some people sleep while the rights they never knew they had slowly disappear.

Conceit describes the justification of the 'elite' to make decisions for the masses as a parent does for a child.

Friedrich Hayek called this the 'fatal conceit' because of the impossibility for a bureaucracy, however smart and well-educated, to be better informed than the people collectively.
Distrust of others' judgment and motivations makes us willing to give up our own freedom in order to restrict theirs.

Impatience with the pace of non-coercive solutions to very real and troubling problems leads people to reach for the easiest solution: pass a law.


A democracy is measured by how it treats its minorities, but great energy and will are required to defend the rights of other groups with which you don't personally identify. The Holocaust was not an aberration, but is repeated all around us on a smaller scale every day.

Perceived Crises
The only thing we have to fear is
Fear itself.

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt


Fear is the most interesting cause of the erosion of rights, because the others are, if not admirable, at least rational and understandable. Fear is quite often irrational, based on distortions of perception and judgment of the likelihood of a threat. Human beings evolved to live in bands of no more than one hundred individuals, never venturing far beyond their immediate surroundings, so any information about potential threats was relevant; information was scarce, and the threats were real and close to home.

Now, our hyper-vigilance is counterproductive: our heritage leaves us ill prepared to filter out news reports of distant natural disasters, criminal acts, terrorists bombings, disease outbreaks, or freak accidents (e.g. plane crashes).

Daytime talk shows vye to bring us the most horrific stories, all totally irrelevant. The parasitic fear-mongering class that derives its money and power from trafficking in fear (e.g. overpopulation, immigrants stealing jobs, destruction of family values, unsafe consumer products, genetically-modified foods) exploits the media to spread its message of doom to every living room, keeping the collective adrenaline level permanently maxed. If you really want to know your chances of dying from some threat, check out the statistics from the National Safety Council.

http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm

There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

--Thomas Sowell

A few voices of reason try to restore perspective, but of course, good news is no news. In a country the size of the USA, improbable events happen every day, some of them bad.

In Hoodwinking the Nation, Julian Simon explains how bad news is manipulated into a perceived crisis, and how good things really are, and getting better.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-364es.html
http://www.elsol.org/f_liberosion.html