The National Security Agency (NSA) :: 08/04/2013

Editor's note: Bill Lafferty is an author, and member of FOAC. For more info on Bill, please visit his website for very clear opinions on Big Government and other topics. He is a regular contributor to FOAC's website.

WilliamLafferty.com http://www.williamlafferty.com the national security agency

The National Security Agency Sunday, August 4, 2013

William Lafferty's blog

There is a lot of debate about whether the NSA has gone too far in snooping on American citizens. The debate is a waste of time. No matter what the answer is, the NSA will continue to do what it has been doing and it will continue to develop even more intrusive ways to do it.

That is its nature. It doesn't matter whether the Congress or the president or anyone else directs the NSA to cease and desist.

It will say it has stopped all snooping on citizens and continue to do what it wishes. That's what the spy-police agencies do and that's what they have always done. Short of disbanding these agencies, there is no way to change that.

Each such agency is a secret fiefdom in and of itself. At any agency's best, it defines its mission as protecting America and proceeds to do that very thing in Spades. If the mission is absolute protection, logic suggests that knowing everything about everyone is a good idea. You kill the threat any way you can. The problem is that carrying out that mission ignores that a free people need freedom-including freedom from the government.

Protecting the nation is a description of the spy-police agencies at their best. At their worst, they are secret fiefdoms used to build power and the careers of agency bosses. No one, not the congress, not the president, not the people, knows what these agencies do. When the next Snowden emerges, we will see another tip of another iceberg. But until then, no one will know how much money the agencies spend and where it goes. Sometimes, as when the agency sells munitions for cash, no one outside the agency knows there has been a sale or who bought the munitions, or that the agency has money from the sale, often millions of dollars. And no one knows where that money goes. Until Snowden, it was hardly noticed that NSA was in the process of spending 4 billion dollars on a new facility. 4 billion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center ; http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

This sounds bad, but it's not much different from what happens in the rest of the government. Taxpayer money changes hands at all levels of government for purposes that boil down to enriching a small number of government officials. And this will continue to happen not only because the fox is watching the hen house, but also because an institution this large awash in money and operating in secret (executive privilege, congressional privilege, agency privilege, national security, ongoing investigations, etc) cannot be contained.

Up through the Civil War, when there still was a debate about states' rights, democracy was a viable form of government in the United States. State governments defined constitutionality for themselves; and presidents and congresses were known to disagree with the Supreme Court. Power was spread between the states and the federal government. But after Lincoln demonstrated through the killing of thousands of his countrymen that state dissidents would not be tolerated, power became consolidated in the federal government and has remained there ever since.

So we are now faced with a monolithic federal government that is all-powerful. Denizens of the Beltway (congressmen, presidents, bureaucrats, judges, lobbyists, and the army of staffers) are united to maintain that power at any cost. These people, regardless of party, are all the same. People who think there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans should take note of the Republicans' refusal to defund Obamacare. The Republicans pass numerous bills to repeal Obamacare, knowing the bills will not get through the Senate, but they are unwilling to do the one thing that is in their power that actually would derail Obamacare: defund it. Why? Because they all get paid if Obamacare remains the law. Democrats have made deals with big hospitals, big pharmacy, the AMA, unions, big business and big insurance companies, and they are willing to share the loot with Republicans so that everyone has a good retirement.

Although we teach in our schools that we live in a republic, that hasn't been true for some time. At this stage in our history, power has moved from the people to a small group of maybe two hundred people in business and government. These people behave like royalty (the $100 million dollar vacation, armed bodyguards, bulletproof limousines), exercise almost unlimited power in secrecy and make themselves rich on taxpayer money (trace Obama's net worth over the last twenty years). Over time, the natural progression is for this number to get smaller and for power to be distributed among fewer, and then fewer people, until finally, it rests in a single figure. We are on that course.

The best newspapers are full of political punditry describing the problems that beset us in detail and with skill. What the pundits seem unwilling to do, however, is acknowledge the depth of the problems when taken together and the impossibility of fixing the system short of outright collapse or rebellion. Such a prospect is too frightening.

But, of course, not everyone is upset by the problems. Those on the left, the progressives, favor an all-powerful central government that imposes a morality which the progressives imagine is humane and capable of producing a better life. The goal of a humane and better life is shared by progressives and conservatives alike, but it is not until the progressives wake up one day and find themselves in chains that they will realize they made a mistake about the ability of a central government to get them there.

The bright side? This big country can become two countries with the central planners in one morally superior country digging the hole even deeper and the individualist-entrepreneurs in the other country lending them money