Transparency for Me, but not for Thee
In his book The Transparent Society, David Brin predicted that technological advances could lead to a world of great openness and transparency — provided that the citizens could monitor the government as closely as the government monitored the citizenry. This was Brin’s solution to the classic problem, “Who watches the watchers?”
Unfortunately, the current trend is instead towards a system where the transparency is one way only — where the government can watch us, but not the other way around.
In the Internet era, the old saying “knowledge is power” is more true than ever before. Laws requiring citizens to divulge personal information to the government while denying citizens similar access to information about its operations thus threaten to give the government unprecedented power over ordinary Americans.
Fortunately, many Americans are fighting back. Organizations like the Institute for Health Freedom are warning against the privacy-violation implications of mandatory electronic medical records. Under public pressure, the Coast Guard rescinded its rules against covering the oil spill. The Maryland Supreme Court has ruled that wiretapping laws probably do not apply to citizens videotaping police traffic stops.
But while these are all steps in the right direction, the ultimate solution lies in promoting and defending the principle of properly limited government.
The American Founders established this country on the principle that a proper government should be constitutionally limited in its powers, with the purpose of protecting our individual rights.
As Ayn Rand once noted, under a properly limited government, “A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.”
This means that in a free society, a private individual’s actions are none of the government’s business unless he violates someone else’s rights by initiating force or fraud (or is a credible threat to do so). Similarly, government’s actions should, in general, be open to routine public scrutiny as part of the citizens’ right — and responsibility — to ensure that government officials are acting only within the scope of their constitutionally limited authority.
Hence, the government has no business collecting data on your blood pressure or your medication history. Nor does it have any business claiming blanket exemption from FOIA inquiries or preventing citizens from recording police officers in the public performance of their duties. (Of course, the government can and should protect the dissemination of information about legitimate police undercover operations or genuine national security secrets.)
Americans must demand government transparency as a corollary to the broader principle that a properly limited government should be our servant, not our master — as the Founders intended. Otherwise, rather than living in a “transparent society,” we’ll find ourselves in a perpetual “interrogation room society” — like criminal suspects under constant police observation from behind a one-way mirror.
Is this the kind of America we want?
Excellent article, Dr. Hsieh.
Permit me to add this:
To save ourselves from the Looter-in-Chief, his drooling band of fellow power-lusters in Congress and the hordes of those parasites demanding government deliver them the unearned by denying it to the earner, Americans must be willing to stand up for their unalienable right to exist for thier own sake and the pursuit of their own happiness.
Americans must learn to reject the worship of “need” that has been used to create the massive welfare state that now threatens to eat us alive. It is a revolting moral obscenity that Americans have permitted the creation of a vast engine of injustice that sentences every newborn child in this country to a life of bondage, to a life of whatever amount of involuntary servitude is required to pay for:
– food stamps to feed “the needy”
– public housing to shelter “the needy”
– public transportation for moving “the needy”
– public education to school the children of “the needy”
– school lunches to feed the children of “the needy“
– public healthcare to pay the doctor bills of “the needy”
– public healthcare to pay the hospital bills of the “the needy”, including paying for childbirth so “the needy” can create still more children that must be educated, fed, housed and cared for by those sentenced to pay the taxes needed to support the “needy“.
– drugs and medicines for “the needy”
– so-called “earned income tax credits” for the needy, i.e. tax “refunds” to people paying no taxes
– retirement of “the needy”.
The child even faces a lifetime of paying for:
– the “needs” of such “needy” parties as millionaire farmers who “need” farm aid
– grants to “needy” artists
– the bail-out “needs” of businessmen who foolishly bring their businesses to the brink of financial collapse
– subsidies going to “needy” ethanol producers
– subsidies going to “needy” “green energy” producers to build windmills, solar panels and “alternative technology vehicles”
– foreign aid to feed the “needy” all over the globe, including in places where they scream their hatred for Americans on a daily basis.
– domestic aid for the special “needs“ of those who foolishly choose to live below sea level in the path of hurricanes.
– low-cost mortgage loans for the “needy”, even when they cannot repay them.
This is only part of the burden that that child will have to bear — more is being dreamed up and piled on every year.
If one thing is abundantly clear, it is that the growth of government and the welfare state cannot be “limited” once the population concedes the principle that one man’s “needs” justify the initiation of physical force by the government to satisfy those “needs”. There is simply no end to the “needs” that people can come up for government to satisfy.
It is the notion that we are all born into bondage to whatever “needs” others dream up that is unreasonable. And bequeathing a monstrosity like this to our children is a moral obscenity. It must be stopped — and rolled back.
And the first step in doing so is for Americans to learn that when a looter like Obama justifies his latest “spread the wealth” scheme by declaring, “Man is his brother’s keeper”, the proper response is, “Hell no he isn’t, because man is not a slave — and no ‘brother’ on earth, no matter what his ‘needs’, can claim any right to have others forced into the role of being his ‘keeper’”.
All men are created equal and posses equal rights — and no amount of “need” on the part of any of them confers on them some special right to any part of the life, work or property of another man. When Americans can learn to understand and invoke that principle, we have a chance to begin rolling back the horrors listed above. But until they do, the horrors will only continue to multiply until we collapse into economic chaos.
Another excellent and important article by Dr. Paul Hsieh. Dr. Hsieh informs us of the dangers to our freedoms of one sided information transfer: From us to the government. If the government knows more and more about us, and we know less and less about the government, we will not be in a position to intelligently criticise it — it’s the first step on the road to a society of yes-men, of people who are content to accept everything the government says and does because it knows best. We must work to stop this. The government ought to be open and limited.
Dr. Hsieh,
The unauthorized confiscation of medical records by the federal government has been on my mind since the so-called stimulus bill passed. At a healthcare townhall last summer, I asked Wisconsin 8th district representative Steve Kagen (sadly, a physician) how this could be legally accomplished without an informed and express written consent from the patient. He referred to HIPAA. I reminded him that HIPAA had been changed long ago from privacy protection to what now is essentially a patient acceptance/awareness waiver granting physicians permission to give private health information to just about any entity they wanted. Further, I doubted patients, at the time they signed HIPAA statements, believed they were granting the federal government complete access to their records at some unknown point in the future. That can hardly be characterized as an informed consent. He did not address the issue but rather spoke about how important it is for doctors to have quick access to all of a patient’s important health information. A completely different issue. I still have a hard time believing this is constitutional and am surprised more hasn’t been made of it. So I’m happy to see you address it here.
I’d love to see a patient-driven movement where we would supply our physician’s a legal document specifically forbidding the release of any private health record to the federal government. I’ve talked with a couple attorneys and neither were interested in helping me draw up such a document. It would be nice if one could be developed and made available on the internet.
Just last week, to see what would happen, I refused to complete and sign a health history (I did provide essential health information to facilitate safe treatment of a ‘non-medical’ issue) and was told the doctor would need to check with his attorney to see if he could continue treating me. The doctor then started to lecture me…yada yada yada. I sat there thinking how sad it is that a good law-aiding citizen is forced to go to such an extreme (in addition to having to reveal my political beliefs to my dentist, yes, dentist!) to protect my right to privacy. It was surreal and sickening.
Patricia,
I agree completely with your suggestion for a patient driven movement and I am a member of the medical profession. The foundation of HIPPA is based on a “need to know” only basis. There is no excuse for government to know anything about a patient’s medical history without their written consent. A consent that can be withdrawn at any time. The refusal to sign HIPPA papers does not place the physician in a position to refuse care and not risk his own legal ramifications of his/her refusal. The only information the government, state and federal, has the right to know is under Medicare/Medicaid care. That would only reference the number of the patient and the particular service but only generalities for statistics, i.e. the number of admissions, surgeries, treatments, etc., within the categories. I believe that such a movement would be a major driving force in health care and the restoration of the privacy of the individual. The government has chosen to forget that health care service is a commodity – the patient is not.
Helen, where do we start?!!!
A healthcare Tea Party! Yay! Since one of its goals would be to get government out of our bodies, should we call it the Enema Party?
Dr. Hsieh has hit another home run! Excellent piece.
Has Dr. Hsieh even heard of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? If so, why is there not one mention of the excellent work being done by this organization?
Keep up the good fight!
IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation
http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation/dp/0914153102/ref=sr_1_1
details how Germany used a seemingly innocuous government census to hunt down people.
I could use the phone book to hunt someone down – nearly everything can be used as a tool of evil
Excellent article Dr. Hsieh. Those of us living in Canada who value true freedom (admittedly a very small group) are looking to the US for leadership in this area. While the trends in the US are not comforting, at least the debates are taking place, unlike here.
IRS Form 1099-GOV. What we have here is a case of the government taking income which is requiring more an more reporting via IRS Form 1099-MISC and then sending this ‘income, redistributed’ all over the place with NO REPORTING. If the people in NEED actually had this ‘income, redistributed’ reported the same was as regular income we’d see where it went and would know how to change it. Who can blame somebody from gaming a system that is meant to be gamed?
Excellent article, Dr. Hsieh. It is the individual’s right to police the government and it is also their responsibility not to society, but to themselves as individuals. The only person who can feel the suffering of massive government intrusion into an person’s life is the person themselves.
You don’t owe it to me to keep government in check. You owe it to yourself and I owe it to me.
Nice work.
It’s refreshing to read such a clean-cut article without any pragmatic and qualified statements.
Dr. Hsieh makes valuable points, but as an Objectivist (Ayn Rand’s philosophy), his vision of the ideal American society is at odds with our Founding Fathers’ vision.
The Ayn Rand quote that Dr. Hsieh provides illustrates the problem: “A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden”. Such a subjective standard ultimately boils down to “might makes right” – for example, since it is legal to abort a baby at any time during pregancy, up until the moment of natural birth, it is therefore right.