In the midst of the National Security Agency snooping hysteria, Fox Business Network pundit, author and consumer reporter John Stossel claims the federal government spying on its citizens is not that big of a deal compared to the multitude of other ways government interferes in our lives. In a recent Reason blog post, Stossel wrote: “Some of the things they do seem like bigger assaults on our freedom than NSA spying, although we’ve become accustomed to the older abuses.” Some of these abuses that are equal if not greater than the threats on our freedom include the war on drugs, the war on terror and the state monopoly on force and law.
Stossel uses the war on drugs as an example of the federal government trampling personal privacy and said he feels the drug war is worse than NSA spying. Although NSA spying is a gross example of an overly intrusive government, the war on drugs is an intrusion equally as destructive, yet we have grown accustomed to it.
According to the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, 94,600 people were serving time for drug offenses under federal jurisdiction in 2011. Incarcerating drug offenders is a vicious circle that with time only incarcerates more and more people. Because the drug trade is no different than any other market, once dealers are sentenced to prison, competitive dealers will naturally replace them. This can explain why there was a 212.5 percent increase in the number of federally incarcerated drug offenders from 1990 to 2009. I feel that Stossel is safe in saying the drug war has done more to encroach on personal freedom than NSA snooping.
The drug war is also bad foreign policy. According to Columbia University psychology professor Carl Hart, U.S. helicopters are employed in places such as Afghanistan and Colombia to destroy drug crops. This is one of the many ways our drug and foreign policies makes us less safe.
Another tragedy of the drug war is that even nonviolent drug offenders are sent to prison. Enforcement of these laws that incarcerate people for victimless crimes is yet another blunder of the federal government. As opposed to private, or non-monopolistic, law, in which the incentive to pay for incarcerating nonviolent criminals is diminished, we are left with no other option since the state holds a monopoly on force and the legal system.
The war on drugs has proven to be exponentially more harmful to liberty than to the NSA but nowhere near as harmful as the needless wars carried out by our government. The estimated number of civilian deaths due to the Iraq war is more than 100,000, according to www.iraqbodycount.org, not to mention the 4,488 U.S. service men and women killed in Iraq.
John Stossel has received a lot of criticism from other libertarians for saying that the NSA scandal is no big deal compared to the other ways government intrudes on our personal freedoms. Judge Andrew Napolitano is one of them, and he voiced his contentions with Stossel during a recent Fox Business Network segment. Many libertarian blogging sites, such as www.define-liberty.com, have also spoken out against Stossel’s claim.
I may just have become apathetic with government failures at this point, but I side with Stossel on this issue. If our government has already squandered millions on wars, faulty infrastructure projects and failing public schools, and bloated our prisons and court systems with drug users, I would then consider NSA snooping as just another notch on the government’s bedpost.
T. Emmett Ryan is a Santa Fe political science sophomore. His columns appear Tuesdays.
