THERE aren't many imaginable issues that have the power to unite steadfast conservative Republicans like Dick Armey and Bob Barr under the same banner as both Al Sharpton and John Kerry. Yet today each of these politicos finds himself sharing the covers of circumstance with a vast expanse of strange bedfellows, both liberal and conservative, who have aligned against what they recognize as the greatest threat to the Constitution that our generation has ever seen. The facts are in, and they are absolutely chilling. The Justice Department, guided by the myopic vision of John Ashcroft, is currently effecting the largest curtailment of personal liberty in our nation's history. Ashcroft has the public convinced that the world is now too dangerous a place to let Americans retain their civil liberties. In his fight to protect America from outside threats, he truly is subverting its deepest principles from within.
There exists a constant tension between the desire for the government to protect innocent civilians from malicious harm on the one hand, and to respect the unalienable rights of the individual on the other. There is a significant cost to society whenever the government involves itself either too much or too little in the affairs of its citizens, by either trampling their freedoms or leaving them vulnerable to attack. The trick, of course, is finding that elusive optimal level of government intervention.
Ashcroft claims that his sweeping new Homeland Security measures are essential to protect America against a phantom army of bloodthirsty terrorists who want nothing more than to murder as many elderly women and young children as possible. And in his assessment of our fanatical enemies, he's probably right. But before deciding whether to accept a certain measure of homeland security that promises to protect us from Bush's so-called "evil-doers", we must first weigh its cost in terms our freedom lost versus its benefit in terms of safety gained.
Taking the second of these considerations first, it is sad but obvious that any new domestic security precautions will offer precious little added safety against well-planned terrorist attacks like those of September 11. In our densely populated, pluralistic nation, all it takes is a relatively small number of very determined people with the crudest of weapons -
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