Sunday, January 01, 2006

The price of security is too high

I don't know T.L.Rodgers from a bar of soap but this column has made more impression than others on the same subject.

"I would much rather live as a free man under the highly improbable threat of another significant Al-Qaida attack than I would as a serf, spied on by an oppressive government that can jail me secretly, without charges."

And.....
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security." Benjamin Franklin.

If, on occasion, the issue seems somewhat remote to me I think about the extreme reactions I sometimes get from politicians when making submissions to select committee. Then I ask myself, if they had the powers to shut me up, would they use them?

We mustn't become so distracted by bogeymen that we lose sight of our freedoms being chiselled away.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Poor, poor barry doesn't understand that Bush violated the law and the US Constitution. Of course if he supports dictatorships and not individual freedom that is his right. But by his logic then anyone who wants freedom has the right to do anything they want to him.

And barry (who didn't capitalise his name himself so I won't) doesn't know if Bush kept the US free of an attack. He only knows there wasn't an attack. That can also mean that none were planned. After all Bush is doing billions of dollars of damage to the US economy and bin Laden accomplishes more destruction to the US by simply watching Bush rack up $400 billion deficits each year and massively increasing the welfare state.