Page 22 - Fruits from a Poisonous Tree

6 Fruit from a Poisonous Tree

Privacy is vanishing beneath the rising floodtide of government power.
Government officials have asserted a de facto right to search anybody, any
time, on the pretext of “terrorism.”
The average American now has no freedom from having government
agents strip-search his children, rummage through his luggage, ransack his
house, sift through his bank records, and trespass in his fields. Today, a
citizen’s constitutional right to privacy can be nullified by the sniff of a dog.
Federal officials have given rewards to hundreds of airline ticket clerks for
reporting the names of individuals who paid for their tickets in cash, thereby
allowing police to confiscate the rest of people’s money on mere suspicion of
illegal behavior.
Local police are conducting programs in two hundred thousand
classrooms that sometimes result in young children informing police on
parents who violate drug laws.
The number of federally authorized wiretaps has almost quadrupled since
1980 (except the ones intended to catch spies of our nuclear secrets), and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to prohibit development of new
types of phones that would be more difficult to wiretap. The demagogues in
Congress are rabid with the intent of taking away our right to carry and bear
arms. Could this description of events occurring in the United States today
have applied to pre-war Nazi Germany?
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are increasingly under assault.
The proliferation of vague federal regulations have had a severe chilling effect
on the free speech of millions of businessmen who cannot criticize federal
agencies without risking reprisal that could destroy them. Thanks to a 1992
federal appeals court decision and a late 1993 congressional uproar, even
pictures of clothed children can now be considered pornographic, thus greatly
increasing the number of Americans who can be prosecuted for violating
obscenity laws by taking pictures of their own children.
The government is manufacturing more criminals now than ever
before. It is increasingly choosing the citizen-target, creating the crime, and
then vigorously prosecuting the violator. During the past fifteen years, law
enforcement officials have set up thousands of elaborate schemes to entrap
people for “crimes” such as buying plant supplies, asking for a job, or shooting
deer. Hundreds of private accountants have become double agents, receiving
government kickbacks for betraying their clients to the IRS.
Total federal spending has increased from under $100 billion in 1963
to over $3 trillion in 2002, and as spending has grown, so has bureaucratic
control and political power. Since 1960, the federal government has created
over a thousand new subsidy programs for everything from medical care to
housing, from culture to transportation. Subsidies are the twentieth century’s