Trust the Government ?

by Frank Ragoczy

I have been reading, bemused, the onslaught of editorials and articles in my Local Daily World that tend to characterize citizens who don't trust our government as paranoid and misinformed. This morning, I found the full front page of one section headlined: "FOCUS: Conspiracy," with articles entitled "Suspicious Minds," "Cyberspace: Instant Forum for Conspiracies," and "Freedom at Risk, Militia Leader Warns."

The kicker was the editorial in the same issue about the latest revelations on tobacco as an addictive drug (surprise, surprise). I had to agree that subsidizing tobacco production has to be uniquely stupid even in the annals of governance, but then the last paragraph read: "And it's time for elected officials to quit the bickering and name-calling and get on with the business of looking out for the public's health."

Certain I had somehow missed something, my inner warning bells a-jangle, I went to my computer and booted up my new Acrobat Sampler CD-ROM disk from the good folk at Adobe, accessed the "Historical US Government Documents" section and initiated a search. I was nonplused to find that, although there were vague mentions of "promoting the public good," and "the general welfare," there wasn't a single reference to the "business of looking out for the public's health."

On the other hand, in the Declaration of Independence, I found the following statement: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . " (emphasis mine).

This principle seems to disagree with the idea of a Big Paternal Government We All Trust, charged with the duty to protect adults from themselves.

I can remember reading many articles over the last ten or fifteen years, outlining the most grievous excesses and crimes perpetrated by the bureaus and agencies of this same government we are now encouraged to trust: infants secretly given radioactive milk and soldiers secretly given LSD, without their permission, just to see what would happen; a group of black patients who had their life-saving medication withheld for similar purposes; the vile excesses of J. Edgar Hoover, Mister McNamara's belated confessions about Viet Nam; the list goes on and on. I didn't read these in the National Enquirer, but in my morning Local Daily World. The significant point about these stories may be that they all happened twenty or thirty years ago and those responsible always seem to have died or got away scot-free.

This brings me to my conclusion about the plethora of recent articles on conspiracy and paranoia and the lack of serious investigative reporting into the many claims of governmental malfeasance and betrayal of trust: apparently terrible crimes done against its citizens by the government of the United States can only happen in the past, preferably at least twenty years previously. Anyone who suggests that these same activities might go on these days is a paranoid conspiracy-nut or wacko militia-member and should be ignored or ridiculed. The proper venue for discussion of such reports would appear to be The Local Daily World sometime in August of 2018, after enough time has passed that they can be addressed as legitimate news stories instead of the imaginings of the lunatic fringe, and after the guilty are safely out of reach.

Let me suggest that in the never-ending competition between individual liberty and government control, the Press should err, if at all, on the side of freedom, since the harm done by too much personal liberty is historically so much less dire for Mankind than that done by too much power in the hands of any government. The new technologies in the hands of leaders corrupted absolutely by the inconceivable power held by modern heads-of-state may well end the human story or turn it in directions we would not consider to be human. Adolph Hitler was not the first or the last person to hold enough power to do great evil. Unless we successfully address the hunting-pack behavior that causes leaders to go mad and citizens to follow their mad instructions, we may win a species-wide Darwin award.

The labs now have increasing success at some form of genetic manipulation and also some very small micro-robots that aren’t quite self-replicating yet, but it’s just a matter of time now. What happens when you put that kind of power in the hands of the leaders of the government of a modern super-state?

This also leaves me in a terrible quandary: When the Editors of my mainstream hometown newspaper can manage to actually keep a straight face while advising me to believe and trust our government, where can I go to find out what's really happening?

The Internet?

-Frank Ragoczy e-mail = frankr@liberty-in-our-time.com