Former President George W. Bush is safely out of the White House, and civil libertarians everywhere can breathe a little bit easier. Today, it appears our Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights, is safer, more secure and stronger.
However, this is not the case. Between the march of technology and the needs of a changing economy and bureaucratic landscape, our rights are at greater risk today than ever. Many of these rights are given up involuntarily, in the name of necessity and even fairness. However, we also lose rights when we give them up for convenience, laziness or a consumerist fad.
The right to privacy, itself a creation of years of jurisprudence and constitutional theory, also stands guard before the others. An essential right, if only implied from the others, it embodies the spirit of many of the first 10 amendments. If we cannot have a right to our private selves, how can we have our right to speak, our right to lawful searches or our right to not self-incriminate?
As gas prices and demand fluctuate unpredictably, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a reliable revenue stream from gas taxes to maintain roads. The answer to this problem many say lies in user fees or a vehicle miles tax, which doubles as a means to reduce driving. One such proposal in Massachusetts involves placing a microchip in inspection stickers to track the number of miles driven by a car. Drivers would pay based on miles driven. However, in order to ensure that the miles driven are within the state, it would inevitably involve tracking where everybody drives.
Let’s forget about the way a vehicle miles tax would treat hybrids and gas guzzlers equally. We can ignore how it would punish the more far-flung areas of Massachusetts where long driving can be unavoidable. The chief crime is its blatant attack on our right to keep to ourselves. Whatever the government’s motives are now cannot outweigh the risk of greater government intrusion in the future.
Gov. Deval Patrick posited that people already surrender a great deal of privacy with the prevalence of Facebook and MySpace. However, what the governor fails to realize is that participation on these websites is voluntary. Unfortunately, there have been tangible consequences for those who have revealed too much on their accounts. Lost jobs and college judicial proceedings are not uncommon. Moreover, Mark Zuckerberg could tell the governor how popular uprisings against Facebook’s privacy invasions have ended new setups and privacy policies.
The government needs to exercise self-restraint, and residents of Massachusetts and other states contemplating a vehicle miles tax must stop and consider the consequences. We cannot write off our civil liberties as a vestige of a simpler time, not long for this world of social networking. Telling the government to back off is part of the solution; however, we must consider how much of our private lives we surrender to Facebook and others. Otherwise, politicians and bureaucrats may decide that the Bill of Rights is obsolete – that result is simply un-American.
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