Ron Paul on the security state

Ron Paul joins the voices being raised against the security state and the use of fear to justify suppression of rights in the name of "safety."

...School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America.

Do we really believe government can provide total security? Do we want to involuntarily commit every disaffected, disturbed, or alienated person who fantasizes about violence? Or can we accept that liberty is more important than the illusion of state-provided security? Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. We shouldn’t settle for substituting one type of violence for another. Government role is to protect liberty, not to pursue unobtainable safety.

Rep. Ron Paul, 14th District of Texas
Government Security is Just Another Kind of Violence
Ron Paul
(h/t Zero Hedge)

Credit where credit it due.

However, there is a jump in logic in the argument:

Furthermore, do we really want to live in a world of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, X-ray scanners, and warrantless physical searches?  We see this culture in our airports: witness the shabby spectacle of once proud, happy Americans shuffling through long lines while uniformed TSA agents bark orders.  This is the world of government provided "security," a world far too many Americans now seem to accept or even endorse.  School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America.

Here's were the reasoning goes off the rails. The rationale for the security state and the surveillance state is combatting terrorism by waging a "global war on terror," not preventing school shootings or domestic crime, even the "war on drugs."

OK, Dr. Paul is objecting to the NRA plan to increase security here, but we already have a massive intrusion of government into civil liberties based on "terrorists." Then we learn that domestic security was monitoring Occupy protests closely to identify potential terrorists. This is the outrage that lovers of liberty need to be raising out voices in unison over.