Liberty > Security

(I apologize if this post is too long) I agree with most of your specific policy positions, but I will argue why I do not believe they support your case: 1. National Defense and Security "The Constitution authorizes the federal government....to "provide for the common defense [of these states]." It sounds like you have stated from the beginning that a necessary precondition for the establishment of any governmental agent designed to protect liberty is a national defense force to secure the land said government administers, as well as clear it of any entities with might threaten liberties or the authority of the government intended to protect it. If no such entities exist, then there is ostensibly no purpose for the government. This is to say that if you agree security is a required precondition for the original inception of liberty, then you must acknowledge that the foremost priority of government is to provide the minimum security necessary for liberty to exist. Furthermore, the obligation to obey and defer to the authority of a national defense force (or protection), as well as the obligation to fund it with taxes and lives during war, as well as the entitlement of protection received from it, all fall squarely under the sphere of positive rights. If we agree that security is a priority and precondition for liberty, then the next step is to discern what relative "amount" should be in place for a functioning society to work. Liberty and security are intertwined, and as you said "a false dichotomy," which brings me to the next point..... 2. Anarchy vs. Totalitarianism "Presenting the American people with either anarchy or a totalitarian state is a false dichotomy." Anarchy and totalitarianism are two options presented on either extreme of the spectrum, with a baker's dozen of other possibilities lying somewhere in between; what you are offering (whether it be a minimalist state, decentralized government, "correct" balance in a Constitutional republic as envisioned by the Founders, what have you) lies somewhere in the spectrum closer to either one end or the other. If you're offering the most basic government that creates the greatest amount of freedom conceivably possible without degenerating into some sort of tyranny in chaos, then you are in effect offering total anarchy, or at least the only form of it possible. If you are offering something more secure than that, then you are arguing my case even stronger than I am. A state of anarchy or freedom needs to be preserved from attack, as we have never lived in a world where pure freedom has ever been the norm. The only task then as far as I can tell, for the government is to provide the minimum security necessary for liberty to flourish. This isn't just the highest priority and most important function of government, but the *only* function of government. 3. Separation of Powers, Judicial Review, and Corruption "The Supreme Court has the indirect power of judicial review....to evaluate the acts of the Congress and the Executive Branch....if the acts are not constitutional, they are not legally authorized. " A government that can grant rights can just as easily take them away, and only acts to serve the interests of those who control control it. The Constitution does not provide any more natural constraint on itself than any other instrument of government, and only means what the men given the power to interpret desire it to mean. Freedoms delineated in a written document become as meaningless as the paper it's written on without the security of protection needed to back it up. The interpretation of the Constitution and the American legal system are based in the common law, originally based on the English common law (1). This is evidenced by the fact that some Constitutional freedoms, such as freedom of speech, were interpreted based on English customs and local jurisprudence in the colonies regarding "prior restraint," which allowed freedom of speech but prohibited certain forms of sedition (2). This continued to during and after the Revolutionary War, leading of course to the Alien and Sedition Act, and since that time freedom of speech regarding sedition has been expanded as the common law has evolved (3). The common law and the judges who interpret it are susceptible to the needs of utility and pragmatism required to carry out efficient justice in varying situations, as well as changes in values, customs, and demographics over time, politics and the selective biases of their beliefs and interpretation, and of most importantly of all, money (4). It's absurd to think that rights can be granted from above, authority, or that the law is its own constraint when select men are given the power to create it. If you believe that the current separation of branches and the Supreme Court act has any natural constraint on the limits of Constitutional interpretation, just look at how its interpretation and the laws that surround it have changed over the past 200 years in response to specific case law (5). I advocate for a system of security to protect against authority in the first place, built from the *ground up* wherein the people are endowed with the ability to protect themselves rather than letting the elevated authority act as its own watchdog and benefactor of security, a role that it has routinely failed to fulfill. As I have previously outlined, until that security exists, there's no reason think any freedom will be created and we're just going to keep having this same conversation, which brings us to the next point: 4. The Failure of the War on Terror I would take what you're saying even further; it's hard to imagine how the prolonged war on terror and various governmental counterterrrorism measures have made us more "secure," given their own findings as described in the National Intelligence Estimate (a consensus view from 16 spy agencies) that the it has directly led to the growth of worldwide terrorist groups (6). Not to mention that the average Americans is very much more insecure in a world where torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention without trial, warantless wiretapping has become more common than when it started, and is now faced with whatever threat the terrorism originally posed now coupled with whatever threat posed against our civil liberties. If all wasted public resources were invested in other projects such as defense rather than preemptive strike, or diplomacy and economic development rather than war, it's hard to believe we'd be in less secure than we are in now. But since we agree on this point, I'm going get back to the bottom line: what possible reason do we have to believe that these actions from unaccountable governmental agencies are going to do anything different than what they've continually done so in the past, and do so currently, unless some form of protection is built in to prevent it from occurring? We can change, restructure, or alter government, but as you already mentioned the leaders we have do not represent the people, and electing politicians seems futile when politicians are the ones who have created the policies. As I have elaborated on earlier, the Constitution does not serve as its own protection when these very same leaders are the ones who are in charge of interpreting it. I guess I just don't understand how the argument can be made that building greater security into the system to protect against such authority and abuses of power (that we agree make us less secure) and protect freedom would result in anything less than greater levels of both security and freedom, or that negative rights take precedence when positive rights are necessary for negative rights to exist. As you've already said, the current practices taken by these agencies are blatantly illegal, and yet they've continued to happen without any consequence, nobody's been prosecuted for it, and no one responsible for it has gone to jail (7) (sources in comments)