Privacy Concerns

The Times, and the rest of the Angry Left, continues to obsess about the possibility that, under the Patriot Act, the government might – horrors – seek to discover one’s reading list at the local bookstore or library.

Now, information being power, permitting government to secure or maintain volumes of information on the populace is somewhat problematic. Certainly, while government may legitimately maintain such information on people as they voluntarily place into the public domain, when it possesses good reason for doing so, we should be cautious about governmental efforts to amass dossiers on otherwise unoffending members of the public.

That having been said, the same folks who fear for our liberty if our library records are disclosed display absolutely no concern whatsoever about many more intrusive governmental information demands. Primary among these, of course, is the requirement that we all file comprehensive financial statements with the government every year. But consider other aspects of our life – such as firearms ownership – about which the left entertains no reservations whatsoever about governmental possession of information.

Put simply, if government ever becomes so tyrannical as to threaten our basic liberties, is a list of library patrons, or a list of gun owners, likely to attract the most governmental interest?

And if so-called "privacy advocates" were serious, they’d be much more offended by the huge intrusion into individual privacy required by the income tax than by the insignificant -- and wholly hypothetical -- encroachment involved in governmental discovery of the occasional reading list. I’ll be delighted to disclose my subscription to the "Library of America" series in exchange for keeping my income confidential.