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your social security number, copies of your credit cards and last years IRS forms).

More than ever, citizens are also urged, and in some cases mandated, to report other people for possible crimes. Local, state and federal websites and the inside cover of every phone book have lists of toll free phone numbers for making anonymous tips about everything from alleged terrorist activity to illegal dumping.

Even the battle against smoking and bad eating habits has gone too far. Smoking is an addiction, most often started in adolescence, that won't go away by forcing smokers to not smoke on hospital grounds. Nor will it go away by increasing taxes to $3.00 a pack as New York City has done. Increased cigarette taxes are an unfair tax on the poor, as the poor smoke in disproportionate numbers, and the high price of cigarettes has lead to increased smuggling. And if I want to eat food with transfats in them, then it should be my decision, not the government's.

Let me state the obvious-I am opposed to crime and terrorism. I don't smoke, I exercise, and I try to eat right. Indeed some of the above measures may be necessary at times, especially if they do not become permanent. Nevertheless, the prevailing mood in America is increasingly one of let's make ourselves safe and healthy regardless of the cost to liberty and privacy.

If you were born in the last thirty years, you might not realize that the shift from a desire for freedom to one of security is profound and has the potential for enormous, negative consequences. When I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the word freedom was on everyone's lips. Some people mistook hedonism and anarchy for freedom, and there was a marked increase in the use of illegal drugs and dangerous sexual activity. At the same time, however, great victories were won for civil rights-rights that affected every American.

But now there is only fear. Fear that the old man who runs the ice cream truck might be a sex offender. Fear that the Pakistani who runs the gas station might be a terrorist. Fear that the student who writes a dark story might shoot up the school. Fear that transfats might kill us.

"Live Free or Die"-like Patrick Henry's, "give me liberty or give me death"-is not an ultimatum. It's a choice. And when we chose safety at the expense of liberty by giving our government enormous power over our lives, we chose not only the death of liberty, but we may find our security threatened by the very government that we asked to provide it.

Learn more about this author, Dan Weaver.
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