Unsurprisingly the US government has emerged as a 'threat to lives'. The reasons are very clear. The US government has shown itself to be a brash and arrogant critic of some important values:
1. Accountability
2. Personal expression
3. Citizen's interests
The notion of government protecting whistleblowers has been dealt a serious blow when a government hunts down and even threatens to assassinate you, as some officials like the Arkansas and Alaskan governors have done.
If the US government was serious about these values, it would have negotiated with WikiLeaks to ensure that the organisation acted in good faith. i.e. It only released information which the public had a right to know. I am inclined to think that WikiLeaks did release information it had no business releasing. You can't argue that this is simply public information, and everyone has a right to know. The US government has however set itself up for failure by:
1. Not keeping the public trust - the people are rightly cynical about the US government
2. Shooting the messenger - If there was really a threat to US and other lives, the US government should have sat down with WikiLeaks and negotiated principles upon which 'certain information' would be released.
The government however, by being a creature of coercion, has no respect for people's rights. That is just the rhetoric it spins, in order to keep the public confidence. I think the public are split. Personally I tend to think the public just don't think one individual is important. This is sad because it highlights a lack of empathy for others, and a greater loss of regard for freedom. People are only supportive if they have some bad experience with the government. Unfortunately, too many people just have too low expectations, and they just don't see the tragic waste resulting from government. The problem of course is they cannot conceive of another world, where decision-making is not centralised, where government holds 'common law' principles which apply in context, as opposed to arbitrary statutes which offenders side-step by 'loopholing'. And what about the waste? How many white elephant projects, botched privatisations, poorly run government services do we have to witness. People just say 'but they provide a lot of good', but the reality is that they extort 30-50% of the nation's income to provide their services inwefficiently. The return on public funding is probably in the order of 'negative 30%'. They are a drain on the private sector, much as a cancer can be considered to be. I will go so far as say crime is worse, more marriages fail, people are poorer thinkers because of government. People do not realise the extent of the impact.
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Author
Andrew Sheldon
