DNA, guns and freedom

Three recent events served, when taken together, to cast some light on the always tricky relationship between government and freedom.

We know we need government to secure our rights (and hence our freedom), but the hard part has always come in controlling it once it is established. All reasonable theories of politics posit at least some kind of inverse relationship between freedom and government, such that it is eventually possible to get too much of the latter at the expense of the former (hence the concept of tyranny).

Event One-gun control fails in Congress, despite a big push for it in the wake of the Newtown tragedy. Particularly frustrating for many was the inability to even agree on a system of background checks.

Event Two-the U.S. Supreme Court OKs in Maryland v. King the use of DNA swabs of arrested persons as a routine step by law enforcement officials.

Event Three-the revelations that the National Security Agency has been conducting metadata surveillance of the communications of ordinary Americans as part of the war against terrorism.

Looked at individually, what the government is doing here or what is being proposed for it to do makes sense.

Most people support background checks in an attempt to make it harder for criminals and the mentally disturbed to get ahold of guns. Most of us find the use of DNA swabs by police acceptable because we think just about anything within reason that makes it easier to catch criminals is a good thing. Despite concerns over potential abuses, polls also indicate most Americans approve of intelligence agencies collecting data on communications if it can help thwart terrorist plots.

In other words, each of these things (and most other things government does) can find widespread support, at least when viewed individually and in relation to specific problems or threats.

But that’s where the tricky part comes in-in the cumulative drip drop effect of these and other practices on the always uneasy relationship between governmental power and individual freedom.

At just about every step along the way, an unequal battle takes place in our political process in which the need for government to solve an allegedly urgent problem is pitted against the need to restrain governmental power. The battle is unequal, because governmental action almost always wins. And it almost always wins because with each demand for government to “do something” about this or that, to solve yet another in the never-ending series of problems found in an inevitably imperfect world, the benefits tend to be immediate and clearly identifiable and the costs always undetermined and pushed into the future.

The arguments on the other side, the ones regarding lost freedom, are mostly theoretical in nature, difficult to express in concrete terms, and invariably involve the hazy long-run rather than the pressing here and now.

In the back of our minds we know that there is this fragile thing called freedom that we’re supposed to cherish and protect, and that government can at some point become a great threat to it, but when you’re providing health care to the indigent, protecting consumers from unsafe drugs, and fighting terrorists who want to kill us (or nuts with guns in schools), the freedom argument tends to predictably lose out.

The challenge posed by such trade-offs becomes even more difficult because most of us want government to do many more things these days than it did a century or so ago (and it obviously does!), but it isn’t always easy to distinguish the things that it does that are greater threats to cumulative liberty from those that are lesser threats (and hence perhaps worth the cost in some lost increment of freedom, however measured). As technology improves, the temptation to let government use it to improve our lives and make us safer also grows in tandem. Again, think DNA swabs, computer background checks for guns, and NSA surveillance.

So the general pattern has been to let government do more and more, to regulate, tax, and spend more, to become an ever more intrusive presence in our daily lives in order to correct injustices, combat racism and sexism and poverty and unsafe workplaces and so on.

It all sounds fine, until you consider the cumulative effects; until, that is, you wonder whether we might suddenly wake up one day and find freedom gone, with our having lost it bit by bit on the installment plan, without hardly noticing as it seeped away because no single cut ever hurt that much. At some point, preventing government from acting, even when it might make sense for it to act, might become necessary in order to preserve liberty, for the obvious reason that unconstrained government and liberty are ultimately incompatible.

In the end, by having a political culture with a primary (sole?) function of identifying new governmental tasks, one that in essence sees only the trees of societal problems to be solved rather than the forest of freedom, we gradually lose the ability to think about government and freedom in the manner intended by those who designed our republic.

And when we lose that way of thinking, freedom can’t help but be lost with it.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 11 on 06/24/2013

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