Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

The average citizen in the western world today enjoys unprecedented levels of personal safety. Personal safety is a natural desire of most people. As such the promise of enhanced safety has always been a popular justification for ever more intrusive regulations and the involvement of government in the private affairs of citizens.

The demands for intrusions and restrictions on personal liberty in the name of public safety and the protection of children are multiplying at an alarming rate. But were the quantum leaps in safety we enjoy today the result of intrusive prior restraint measures, or the freedom of thought and action that prior restraint measures must by their very nature compromise?

Nearly every factor that allowed us to leverage ourselves out of the primitive world developed in spite of the attempted prior restraint of those in power at the time. Science, medicine, democracy, and free enterprise were all delayed and resisted by the vested interests of the past. In spite of the growing desire of many to justify its use in the vain desire of guaranteeing their personal safety, prior restraint has an almost spotless history of abuse against progress, human rights, and yes - personal health and safety. The devil's offer is always attractive on the surface - only after it's signed in blood does the true cost of the deal become painfully obvious.

The drug testing of airline pilots is a prime example of intrusive regulations being imposed in response to an emotion based fear and a gross disregard for the primacy of liberty. At first glance the idea seems a reasonable safety measure, but beyond the emotional appeal lurk far greater dangers than the alleged issue of drug use by airline pilots. A search of the NTSB database shows that there wasn't even a single commercial airline accident caused by the use of the drugs being tested for before drug testing was imposed and pilot's constitutional rights of privacy compromised.

The entire justification for imposing drug testing on airline pilots is a hysterical fraud perpetrated by those who's real interest is in validating the concept of intrusive drug testing not in solving any real threat to public safety. Regardless of the means or manner of drug testing, it is still an intrusion - in principle even if not in physical discomfort or inconvenience.

The common thread through all of these failed efforts is their dependence on prior restraint. They all require a prior intrusion into the freedoms of a broad segment of the population in the hope of affecting a relatively small number of those subject to the regulations. They often base their focus on compliance with an arbitrary test that is only abstractly related to the condition they propose to address. The measures are imposed without any prior justification in the form of a provable pre-existing threat to public safety that would reasonably be solved by the measures. Most dangerous of all is that they are founded on the principle that any rights and freedoms can be suppressed without the necessity of proving that a real threat even exists if the emotion based justification is public safety.

Once established, prior restraint measures are nearly impossible to remove. When the measures are proven to be ineffective, their supporters almost always fall back on the rationale that if they save even one life all the trouble and sacrifice will have been worth it. But that emotion based justification is almost never valid. The hard reality is that these failed solutions are costing far more in both resulting deaths and destruction of civilization than they could possibly save through preventing accidents.

Consider how many assaults on citizen's rights are now justified as being to "protect children". Restrictions on 2nd amendment rights, censorship of the Internet, government intrusions into families, the destruction of education, etc. are all supposedly aimed at protecting children - not the suppression and control of citizens rights they turn out to be in the real world.

What seems to be overlooked in these issues is the reality that the most basic principle of our political system has always been the assumption of voluntary compliance with the laws of the land. Only when a small percentage of the population fail to voluntarily comply do legal sanctions come into play. When the majority of the population willingly violates the law, then the law itself is wrong and needs to be changed.

All we have the right to demand of others is the responsible performance of their duties, and this involves ability not arbitrary compliance with irrational and unconstitutional intrusions into the lives of citizens. The only viable solution to drug abuse is to hold people personally accountable for their actions, not destroy society in a misguided attempt to enforce poorly considered and inaccurate arbitrary testing programs.

The assumption of voluntary compliance is the only way a free system can ever work. It's physically impossible for an authority structure to directly monitor and enforce all the laws all the time. Even the attempt at total control that was the old Soviet Union failed to enforce any more than token compliance, and actually encouraged noncompliance as an act of defiance against an oppressive system.

The most dangerous aspect of prior restraint is its consistent history of abuse. For example, once drug testing was established using the stalking horse of transportation safety, those seeking greater government intrusion into the lives of citizens have tried (and largely succeeded) in incorporating it in all manner of ways - most of which have little or no "public safety" aspect. One must be suspicious when the "solutions" sought for real or imagined problems always involve imposing restrictions on rights and freedoms. There is always a better way - but a real solution is too often not the objective.

Prior restraint by definition requires some form of intrusion on the individual's freedom and always impacts both the innocent as well as the potentially guilty. And remember that the potentially guilty are impacted before they have done the wrong that's officially being protected against. Prior restraint is also a fool's errand since no direct reliable means other than actual past actions have ever been established that accurately predict a person's future actions. Prior restraint depends on abstract tests that often turn out to have little or no relation to the problem.

Building off the false validation and public acceptance gained through testing people like airline pilots, intrusive drug testing has expanded into applications where public safety is not an issue and the true nature of the beast starts to become obvious. Drug testing is just the stalking horse - the precursor - of general monitoring and control.

You may be willing to accept these intrusions now because you believe they don't effect you, but you'll likely sing a different tune when innocent sounding drug tests evolve into genetic testing on a wide spread basis. After all, if an employer can test for drug use without any prior justification in employee performance, it can also test for any number of factors when the human genome project is completed. Genetic predisposition to disease or undesirable behavior patterns is certainly a greater bottom line concern to most employers than off duty drug use.

When genetic testing becomes established, the prior restraint so passionately advocated in the name of safety will become a way to predefine and control every aspect of life. The principle of prior restraint will be used to tell citizens what kind of life they can lead and what kind of person they can be. Freedom will become an obsolete concept - and personal safety will be no better for the loss.

Our nation has always by necessity been based solely on the principle of personal responsibility for one's actions. The very success and prosperity of the system that allows people to even consider traveling by air let alone be concerned about the plane crashing, is critically dependent on freedom of action and thought. Those systems who tried to employ prior restraint have provided their citizens a much lower quality of life or failed completely.

The only valid restraint on one's actions is the expectation of being held accountable and responsible if and when one harms another. The whole concept of prior restraint undermines the principle of personal responsibility for one's own actions.

I submit further that people have become increasingly irresponsible directly because of concerted efforts to eliminate accountability for one's own actions from the social contract. Crime has been validated while self defense has been demonized.

Al Capone and his ilk existed solely as a result of intrusive government regulations. When the insanity was temporarily in remission, organized crime was also diminished. Not surprisingly, with the creation of profitable markets for contraband drugs created by renewed intrusive government prohibition to fund their operations, organized crime is once again a problem.

Organized crime is the illegitimate child of government - the more government you have, the more crime there will be both in the halls of power and in the streets. The solution is to restore responsibility by restoring accountability, not to assign to government ever more control over our lives in the misguided hope that intrusive regulations can replace the personal accountability government itself has worked so hard to eliminate.

Unfortunately, along with abdicating personal responsibility we've also abdicated personal aspirations and hopes for the future. The rebellious youth of today see the writing on the wall more clearly than those who mindlessly clamor for more of the "medicine" that's killing us. They see that along with surrendering our freedom, we're killing their future as well. In the name of public safety and comfort we've taken away their right to learn, their hope for financial security, their right to political power, and the possiblity of succeeding by their own abilities and hard work. Can you blame them for being cynical and fatalistic?

Consider also that down through history every previous government has eventually turned against its citizens. Tyranny is the rule in government. The fragile democracies currently scattered around the world are an aberration not the norm. Democracy can only survive as long as its participants aggressively defend their liberty. It's distressing that most of the population see no danger in the incremental elimination of liberty, and are only too willing to surrender their freedom in return for empty illusions of safety. This is historically the same pattern of failure most other democracies and republics have followed. The future of liberty appears grim at best.