Paranoia or Perspective on Privacy?

Paranoia or Perspective? by David Beers   David Beers works with a software company in Houston. He is the former debate coach of the St. John's School in Houston and has a degree in economics from George Mason University.

These changes in public attitudes toward government control are easier to recognize when placed in historical perspective. Consider the enormous popular resistance President Roosevelt met to the establishment of a small Social Security program for retired and disabled people in 1932. Why the opposition to a program that has since become one of the revered institutions of our society? Among the most important reasons was that most Americans felt it usurped their independence in deciding how best to prepare for retirement or unexpected disability.7 Many voiced alarm that the Social Security numbers assigned to each "contributor" smacked of a kind of regimentation they found objectionable. Americans were accustomed to being responsible for their own futures, relying on personal saving, insurance, and mutual aid to deal with life's financial uncertainties. They were morally averse to dependency and suspicious of a government that asked them to trade some of their autonomy and freedom for promises of financial security. Today, Social Security has grown into a vast mandatory transfer program that requires enumeration and categorization of every child at birth or soon after. Working Americans pay about one seventh of their income into Social Security, although polls have shown for years that few working age people believe the program will be solvent at the time they retire -a concern shared and openly voiced by the Social Security Administration itself. Even those currently receiving benefits receive a return on their lifetime "investment" of only about 1 percent -a fraction of the average return on private pension funds. And the Social Security Number has become a universal personal identifier used by the government to access and catalog information about our finances, employment history, education, health and a host of other private matters, despite decades of promises that the Social Security number was "just an account number." The suspicions of Americans during FDR's Administration against trusting their financial future to a government bureaucracy would seem by any objective accounting to have been well founded. Yet most Americans today seem earily satisfied with the government's rhetoric about "saving Social Security" by funneling more money into the system. Proposals to completely or partially privatize the system and return some individual responsibility to retirement planning are met with the kind of suspicion one might expect of a proposal to let toddlers play in traffic. The sense of being efficiently watched, tracked, and guided saps independence and replaces it with a spirit of childlike helplessness. While not all of this deference to state control in our lives is due to the paternalistic atmosphere created by government data collection, the growth of state power and the shrinking scope of personal autonomy have been powerfully enhanced by the state's informational advantage over private citizens. While most debaters will research ways that government can restrict information collected and used in the private sector, the failure of government to restrain itself from monitoring the personal details of ordinary Americans suggests these cases will lack impact. A better approach may be to take away the proverbial fox guarding the hen house and restrict the state's own capacity to monitor and regulate citizen behavior. Consider four excellent case areas for the coming debate season. Back