Beware Idiots, Madmen, and Lunatics

by Harry Goslin
by Harry Goslin

As any thinking American knows, nothing has done more to destroy Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures than the War on Drugs. Among feeble minds, so long as dope-smoking maggots and crack-snorting dirtbags get their doors kicked in by the authorities, our country will be safer, stronger, and more moral. When the evil elements among us are swept away, the land will surely bathe in the sunshine of righteousness.

As the story goes, if you live a good clean life, obey the law, pay your taxes, and don’t say, write, or read too many bad things about the government, you should have no need to fear that your liberties will be violated. Refusing police requests to search your person or property, running from authorities – or through airports, withdrawing or depositing large amounts of money, purchasing or borrowing "subversive" books, nowadays suggests evil intentions. Bad individuals must be made to yield so that the many can be safer, more secure, and lest we forget, more free.

Despite these fantasies, violations of the Fourth Amendment to eradicate drugs and fight terrorism attack all Americans. To think that life, liberty, and property are secure because an individual chooses to refrain from such activities is insane. The history of the twentieth century, from Prohibition to the War on Drugs, from World War I to the War on Terrorism, proves that law has been nothing more than a license for government to commit murder and theft in the name of security and safety. "Good" citizenship will never hold up as a defense against government thugs intent on imprisoning, killing, or taking property, all in the name of enforcing "the law."

The Founders gave us the Fourth Amendment so our government couldn’t do to us what their government did to them; namely, kick in doors in the middle of the night to search for "smuggled" goods (untaxed), weapons, and other items deemed by authorities to undermine good governance and encourage social disorder. Our government would need much more than a hunch or the hallucinations of a drunken officer to act.

The Fourth Amendment protects the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures." These protections "shall not be violated . . . but upon probable cause." Warrants, the "permission slip" to conduct searches and seizures, cannot proceed if probable cause is not demonstrated. Exactly what is to be searched, who and what is to be seized, must be specified on the warrant. The probable cause provision should protect us from the same fate as the Founders.

Alas, "probable cause" has been muddled by the courts and the legal profession in order to create a monopoly of interpretation so that government almost always prevails against the individual. Find the "right" judge to sign off on a warrant and the police can go just about anywhere and do anything if there are drugs, guns, or suspected terrorists involved.

When the Fourth Amendment was added to the Constitution, probable cause was not a legal principle and police forces as we know them did not even exist. Probable cause simply put in place a much higher standard before the government could move against the individual and his property. The police did not mingle about communities like they do now looking for criminals and other evil-doers. The "eyes of the state" were not as prevalent among the people to "find" probable cause so that a judge could issue a warrant to search and seize property and individuals.

On the occasion when a judge determines that probable cause was not properly demonstrated, therefore invalidating the claims of the government against the individual, the government can usually count on "law and order" judges in the appellate courts to correct such "misinterpretations" of the law. "Good" American bobble-heads nod with approval as their government protects them from the "bad" guys.

It was truly a stroke of genius when the authors of the Fourth Amendment used the word "effects," including it among the list of items to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. Clearly delineated like "persons, houses, and papers," it also conveys universal application to anything any person can own now or in the future. To deny this is either an admission of idiocy or an indication of despotic tendencies.

"Effects" are defined as "property," including "moveable goods." What once applied to saddlebags, now applies to cars and computer hard drives. All are property, moveable goods, and hence, "effects" protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Unfortunately, as the "living, breathing Constitution" crackpots preach, we cannot be bound by an archaic document written for a simple agrarian republic. We must allow the Constitution to be revised through interpretation to promote the growth of our increasingly complex, technologically-advanced society. More importantly, we cannot universally respect protections guaranteed to individuals when some individuals might attack our freedom and our way of life.

For proper guidance and leadership, we must rely on the proactive forces of local, state, and federal governments, and their senior-citizen facilitators in black robes, to protect us from developing threats made more likely because of the naïveté of the Founders. "Good" citizens fall in line, believing what their masters tell them: don’t engage in "bad" behavior and your life, liberty, and property will be secure.

Perhaps more Americans should read The Law by Frédéric Bastiat. Anyone professing to believe in real freedom, not the abridged and regulated freedom government claims is necessary in a complex and dangerous world, should read Bastiat. As Walter E. Williams says in the introduction, "Bastiat’s greatest contribution is that he took the discourse out of the ivory tower and made ideas on liberty so clear that even the unlettered can understand them."

Bastiat argues that "the common force," the law, cannot lawfully do what individuals are prohibited from doing; namely, "destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups." To use the law for such purposes is a "perversion." According to Bastiat, perverted law is legitimized because many believe, "that things are ‘just’ because law makes them so . . . it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it." As a result, "under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it another."

Fourth Amendment violations in the name of fighting drugs and terrorism takes the property, liberty, dignity, personal responsibility, and entrepreneurial spirit of all Americans. Contrary to what the self-righteous law-and-order crowd would have us believe, freedom is never defended when individual liberties are curtailed; not even when only maggots and dirtbags are made to feel the wrath of the law.

Pretending that an abuse of liberties is legal so long as it’s directed at "bad" people is a recipe for disaster and only leads to the complete destruction of all liberties. As Tim Freeman said, "When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don’t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I’m innocent. When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don’t own a gun. Now they’ve come for the first amendment and I can’t say anything at all."

In John Adams’ summary of James Otis’s attack on the Writs of Assistance – the reason why we have Fourth Amendment protections, Adams said Otis "asserted" that the right to life, liberty, and property, "were inherent and inalienable, that they could never be surrendered or alienated, but by idiots or madmen, and all the acts of idiots and lunatics were void, and not obligatory, by all the laws of God and man." Beware. We are awash in idiots, madmen, and lunatics.

March 22, 2004

Harry Goslin [send him mail] lives in the Arizona high country.

Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com