bipolar disorder

There’s an increasing rhetorical false dichotomy of “liberty” versus “security” being employed in public debate, and it really makes no sense. Presumably it makes sense to our would-be-fascist leaders because they freely associate “security” with “order”, and thus spare no amount of liberty in its pursuit, but it’s rather lame that everyone has taken it for granted as well.

Matt Welch has noticed this as well, and is appropriately alarmed:

Why do these smarter-than-me people so frequently assume there’s some kind of perfectly balanced scale of a country’s foreign affairs, with one tray marked “liberty” and the other “security”? The idea is bogus on its face.

…

.. I would suggest that a fella can believe with perfect sincerity – even without succumbing to libertarian panic – that liberty and security are complementary, not mutually exclusive.