Disposable Liberty

When I describe my political philosophy to others, more than anything else, it is characterized as a highly utilitarian form of liberalism. I generally hold ethics in disdain and approve of welfare maximizing activity. Nixon and Clinton are my favorite presidents of the modern era by far, I think the one child policy was a good thing, and I fully support trade liberalization, to name a few examples. Yet, even with this strong utilitarian bias, I am utterly shocked with the degree to which the Bush administration has disposed of civil liberties in recent times. The warrentless wiretapping policy was questionable at best, but the recent disclosure of an NSA program that tracks millions of phone calls in the US is beyond reason.

My logic is fairly simple. In this country, there is a very strong constitutional and legal emphasis on the notion that a person is innocent until proven guilty. This restriction applies even before the government is allowed to employ the police power, per the fourth amendment, which mandates that a probable cause must exist before the government is granted the authority to conduct any sort of investigation. When the government is effectively amassing data for purposes like mining and mass analysis, it is essentially investigating the entire population, for which it has no probable cause. Yet, this sort of thing happens all of the time in reasonable cases. Consider the case of security checkpoints at courthouses and airports. At these locations everyone is searched, even though there is no probable cause. But the crucial difference is the purpose for which the power is being exercised. A security checkpoint has a very limited scope because it only exists to verify that each individual is not violating a short, well-known list of rules. While the NSA data collection efforts are also used to make sure that rules are not being violated, the information is used for broad investigational purposes also. This data can effectively be mined at will for whatever information the government seeks. The security checkpoint can only get the data on each individual that is relevant to making sure that their simple rules are not being violated, whereas the NSA has access to a host of data that most likely has absolutely nothing to do with criminal activity, and they are free to analyze it however they wish. Some may claim that the NSA places restrictions on their analysis of this data so as to not violate civil liberties, but unless there is considerably more oversight of these activities, there is no guarantee that infractions on civil liberties are not occuring.

This is just one more chapter in what I believe to be one of the most disastrous presidencies in the modern era. Bush has created spectacularly unsustainable foreign, social, and economic policy. My economics professor cited an Economist poll of American economists, of whom 80% said that if offered a job to work for president Bush, they would refuse. Bear in mind that economists are among the most conservative of academics. This furthers my theory that Bush does not actually represent true conservatism, but a perverse and intellectually indefensible form of neo-Evangelist popularism. The only bright sign on the horizon is that Congressional Republicans are beginning to correctly distance themselves from this very unfortunate man, hopefully realizing that there is no sanity to be found in supporting Bushism. Perverse indeed!