LETTER: Nation is better served by limited government

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I am writing to respond to the column by Jeff Zinsmeister in the Nov. 7 issue of The Rice Thresher . Although I am not a Libertarian, I suppose I would fall into the "and their ilk" of Zinsmeister's column. I advocate laissez-faire capitalism. I therefore feel obliged to reply.

I was deeply disturbed that an opinion editor for a newspaper in a free country would be such an enthusiastic fan of censorship, but no less than twice, Zinsmeister said that this horrible power is "needed" by the state. He uses war as an excuse, but I would argue that censorship should never be imposed.

Notice that I did not say, "The state does not need censorship." There is a very good reason for my choice of words. Unlike Zins- meister, I do not regard the state as an entity independent of the citizens; it was meant to protect. I do not believe that the survival of any state takes precedence over my rights or anyone else's. I will not sit back quietly while someone says that I can be sacrificed to the almighty state if it "needs" to survive.

I will not try to improve upon the words of our founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence. "All men are created equal ... with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." I, for one, am in total agreement with this. The state is nothing if not a collection of individuals with rights .

If the state "must" survive at the expense of these rights, the state be damned. I do not know why censorship would be of benefit to any government other than a totalitarian one. Are we involved in a just war? Then that fact will become apparent in open discussion. Are we not? Then I certainly don't want the state to take control of the economy, conscript young men to die in battle and tell me to shut up and wait my turn to fight.

For the record, let me state that we do need government. We need it to enforce our rights so men will be free to engage in the free trade that makes our standard of living possible. We need the government to do some of the things mentioned by Zinsmeister, but not all of them, the least of which is censorship. Zinsmeister's editorial is rife with "very dangerous attitudes," but I will fight tooth and nail for his right to express them, because it is only by frank, open discussion of ideas that we can discover the truth, as, for example, I have tried to do now by examining this column.

It would have been very easy to trash this column for crediting the government with "pleasantries such as plumbing, electricity [and] decent road[s] ..." without even attempting to gloss over the other "pleasantries" brought to individual human beings by big governments: pleasantries such as the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the countless young men pointlessly sent to die in Vietnam or the planned mass starvation of some 20 million individuals by the government of Stalinist Russia.

But this is useless without countering the notions that make such evils possible. The answer to dangerous ideas, I hope you will see, is open, rational debate, not censorship.

Zinsmeister ends his column with the admonition to be careful of what one wishes for. It is too bad that dictatorships imprison or kill their dissidents; perhaps we might have been able to learn just what it is that Zinsmeister is wishing for.

C.S. Miller Jr.

Graduate Student

Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the November 15, 1996 issue.

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