The Census: A letter to CBC

The following is a letter written by a TBK reader to the CBC:

Dear CBC:

Decades ago, as P.E.T. [Pierre Trudeau - ed.] launched his great society-sic-he once famously said that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, or words to that effect.
And neither has the state any business asking how many bedrooms we have.

About three hundred and fifty years ago, many people in England were opposed to the idea of personal income tax in principle, holding that the disclosure of income was a threat to personal liberty and an unwarranted intrusion into private matters. So the greedy monarch sought a window tax instead. A sneaky income tax by any other name, enforced by the window surveyors.

And so it is today. The state, ever growing, ever intrusive, uses its near unassailable power to badger, cajole, threaten and imprison those who oppose the national census, a device which has no purpose but to facilitate the distribution of income to the favoured clients of the state.

When I was born, the government was scarcely aware of my existence. I had a birth certificate issued, and later a passport. Local authorities noticed my passage through school, but nobody dared ask me if I was a shirt lifter, my marital status, or the size of my income, at least not in a census.

I do not need or should have to justify my desire for privacy. The claim that all census data is private is irrelevant. I am not a subject of the state and neither should I face the threat of confiscation of my property or imprisonment for refusing to comply.

Among those famously opposed to the intrusive state was John Stuart Mill, who set forth principles of individual liberty, among others, in his work, Principles of Political Economy. Influential as he still is, it seems that his words are blindly ignored by the usual suspects, the meedja, the CBC, academics, the public service, and even worse, private business and charities who opine that without the collection of reams of data about each and every individual in the land that somehow society will fail. Utter hogwash. What they mean is that their fiefdoms and private businesses will have to shift for themselves.

Without resistance to the collection of data, it will only be a matter of time before any jumped-up jack-ass will be empowered to ask, “your papers.”

Who cares that the head of the government statistic’s department has resigned in protest over the abolition of the compulsory long census form? Well, I suppose the empire builders in government departments do, the corporate welfare bums (CBC), private enterprise, and any number of ivory tower residents who appear to contribute very little in exchange for their large salaries, perks and pensions and of course the snivelling, whining Left who are not only afraid of an independent free thinking society not beholden to the state, but that anybody would think they know better than they, the establishment elites.

Less government is good. The state is not, as the Liberals and hangers-on believe, a force for good. Look at the awful mess the state has made, left our grandchildren and beyond indebted to the tune of hundreds of billions as the government “does good.” Well, that is one interpretation. Another is politicians buying votes with other people’s money-viz Ruby Dhalla.

No, government does not know best. Never did.

On the bright side the U.S. and the U.K. are starting to listen to the people. Both are considering abolishing their census completely.

I vote!!!!! I vote, I vote.

Dave