The Police State

So long as Obama continues to expand the state in the domestic area — inflating, taxing, regulating, nationalizing — they will put up with abuses of the human rights that they claim to champion.

But people in a society do not find themselves in such a "one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma." Quite the contrary, they must deal with one another repeatedly.

Judge Napolitano has organized his excellent book around a central metaphor. He contrasts sheep, who follow their shepherd with unquestioning devotion, and wolves, who are alert to protect themselves:

If you do believe that they do more good than harm, consider the unseen costs. What kind of private alternatives are being crowded out by the very presence of the police?

They seek dictatorship. All the rest is illusion.

Solzhenitsyn had enough courage to equate socialism and Nazism as equally evil and morally reprehensible.

The truth is that the state must hide not only its wars but all of its activities. It hides its inflation. It hides the effects of its taxation and its protectionism. It fears anyone who draws the cause-and-effect connection between its activities and their deleterious consequences for the rest of us. It is the most destructive force in our world. Because that truth is so momentous, the state does everything possible to hide the smallest drop of blood.

There is a further problem: to concede that there are social problems that cannot be corrected without the state is to give up the entire argument over the future of liberty itself.

But even if you are not likely to be among them, consider the loss of privacy, the loss of liberty, the loss of independence, the loss of all that used to be considered truly American, in the course of building prison nation.

As Glenn Greenwald makes clear, Bush has applied his claim to be above the law far beyond the issue of wiretaps.