Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception (2005) traces the American manifestation of this problem right back to Lincoln: if you give a government, any government, extraordinary powers, those powers become permanent and permanently directed against the liberties of the people. The point of the US Constitution was to enumerate the precise powers of government and to limit government to those specifically enumerated powers. But 'progressive' ideas and the notion of 'a living Constitution' have expanded governance for a century and a half, and here we are . . .
Well, that's the problem. Under the guise of promising greater security, privacy is being destroyed and people are being spied on. Unfortunately, it's too late now to turn back the clock.
It is never too late for a self-sovereign people to declare their independence from any government which does not derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. Every expansion of US government power since Lincoln has been, on its face, a violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. Lincoln may say that "if slavery is not evil, nothing is", and that may well be so in any number of moral systems, but there is, has never been, and will never be any Constitutional means to put the powers of government in the service of any particular moral precept--the precise definition of establishment of religion.
Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception (2005) traces the American manifestation of this problem right back to Lincoln: if you give a government, any government, extraordinary powers, those powers become permanent and permanently directed against the liberties of the people. The point of the US Constitution was to enumerate the precise powers of government and to limit government to those specifically enumerated powers. But 'progressive' ideas and the notion of 'a living Constitution' have expanded governance for a century and a half, and here we are . . .
Well, that's the problem. Under the guise of promising greater security, privacy is being destroyed and people are being spied on. Unfortunately, it's too late now to turn back the clock.
It is never too late for a self-sovereign people to declare their independence from any government which does not derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. Every expansion of US government power since Lincoln has been, on its face, a violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. Lincoln may say that "if slavery is not evil, nothing is", and that may well be so in any number of moral systems, but there is, has never been, and will never be any Constitutional means to put the powers of government in the service of any particular moral precept--the precise definition of establishment of religion.
Unless it's a dictatorship.
In any totalitarian state it is important for the government to control the movement of the people.