Barrel Strength

I said previously that the honest argument about the long form census was essentially that

• it would make government less effective. It would do so by making the gathering of data less accurate, less statistically significant,  and less useful.
• By doing so it would make government less intrusive.

That at least, is the theory.  It has a certain attraction for those of us who fear the power of the state, as I do.

My argument with the libertarian opponents of the LFC is that making government less effective does not accomplish their other, laudable goals. In my view, accomplishing goal number one – less effective government- absolutely fails to accomplish goal number two, less intrusive government.

Here are a couple of columnists with the clarity to argue this point explicitly.

This from Ian Robinson in the Calgary Sun:

What they (those who favour the LFC)  don’t get is that those anachronistic idiots who believe in personal freedom and responsibility think things have already gone terribly, terribly wrong. If we can contrive to throw a monkey wrench into most anything government has planned, we’re standing in line to see who gets to throw it.

We want less government. We certainly want less planning because the more these creatures plan, the less money we have in our pockets to spend on stuff we actually want.

A lot of us never signed up for the degree of insane intrusion that is part of everyday life in this country — an intrusion partly fuelled by census data.

We never expected to see once self-respecting nation states teetering on the edge of bankruptcy — and threatening to bring us all down — because the cancer of big government is sucking so much money from their productive minorities that their economies are imploding.

Filling out a census form has been described as an act of social responsibility and it may well be … if it’s voluntary.

What the sheep don’t get is that it’s also an act of social responsibility to extend your middle finger to government.

It never hurts to remind these leeches they work for us … not the other way around. And without allegiance to that bedrock principle, we’re nothing but serfs.

And that’s a principle a trifle more important than permitting the government to threaten you if you don’t fill out a form

 I agree with every sentiment Ian Robinson expresses. But I think he is doing the equivalent of trying to pick up the Gross National Product with a set of tongs. Of a hundred ways to curb the nanny state, the hundredth least effective is to wreck the statistical basis of understanding the population’s wealth, movements, living patterns, immigration patterns, income distribution, and so forth. It is exactly the argument Bjorn Lomborg makes against the global warming enthusiasts: if you had a hundred things to do to help the planet, reducing green house gases would be the last on the list. In matters of domestic policy, chop taxes, lower expenditure,  pass a law allowing people unequivocally to defend themselves and their families from house intrusions and property loss by all force necessary, fire a few judges by Act of Parliament, legalize private medical care: the list goes on and on.

The inimitable sage of mediaeval Catholic thinking, David Warren, objects to the use of numbers to obscure our understanding of reality.

Let me record in passing how happy I am that the Harper government is getting rid of the “long form” of the census. Or rather, I wish it were doing so entirely: instead it is replacing one of innumerable arbitrary invasions of the citizen’s privacy and freedom with something “voluntary.”

Still, one may hope this will give results so obviously skewed as to be unusable, since a voluntary long form can appeal only to people who enjoy meeting bureaucratic requirements, and we can at least hope that they are unrepresentative of the general population….

I have written before, and from several angles, about the evils that flow not so much from the merely wasteful gathering of statistics, as from the uses to which statistics are put, and the addling of the minds of the users. Few drugs are as debilitating, and even in the course of his narcotic dreams, the drug addict seldom tries to impose his view of reality on the rest of us.

My friend Mr Warren does not merely have an argument with the size and pretensions of the state, he has an argument ith modernity itself: the misuse of science to obscure the truth. Or perhaps, in his terms,  even the proper use of science to obscure the Truth of Revelation.  Very well, David, but I am not alowing you anywhere near the machinery of government, business, or the more prosaic ones found in my toolshed. You would wreck my tools through sheer incompetence, an incompetence founded upon  a profound refusal to contemplate the natural laws and mechanical characteristics on which they are predicated.
And here I return to the argument I made previously, that the opponents think that the government will be less intrusive when it is less knowledgable; that its actions will be less obnoxious to freedom of behaviour and belief when it does not know who you are or what you are doing, as a statistical aggregate [note the vital condition here - statistically].  The argument seems plausible until you examine what we ask out of governments: sewers, highways, medical care, urban planning – and however ineffective , law enforcement. Asking for the same level of services while denying  government (all three levels) the means whereby to deliver them, or to plan for their delivery, does not strike me as sound policy.

Trust

Finally, to make a point on which  Blair Atholl frequently has founded his arguments, the social capital of trust is of great importance. Once trust is exhausted, we are caught in a profound morass. (see Francis Fukuyama’s book of the same name, Trust, for an explanation of the relationship between tyrannical governments and the destruction of social capital, such as trust).  The trust I am speaking of here is the trust Canadians have that our governments are by-and-large well intentioned and persuaded by evidence. It seems to me that the government is shredding that trust to no profit by rasing alarms about the degree of personal intrusion mandated by the long form census. The personal data is jealously guarded by StatsCan and is not available, by law, to any other department or branch of government. The government also seems intent upon signalling that it cares little for evidence in the formulation of policy. We will not get that trust back.

This issue may not resonate for partisans, but it does with the kind of people the Conservatives need to raise them to a majority in Parliament.