RE: The Real Threat to Privacy (and every other liberty)

["GPeisert" <gpeisert@jamesgregory.com>]

A few points about the credit bureau issue and the real threat to
privacy...

1. The credit bureau is not the government and does not exercise the force
majeure of the state. They are not a court system or a penal system. They
are a business. Like every business, they exist solely at the behest of
their customers.  The jurisprudential notion of the "presumption of
innocence" is misapplied with respect to the credit bureau (or any
business) issue.

2. Businesses sometimes invade privacy. When they do, customers have the
right to fight back in two ways: (a) They can appeal to the legal system
via law suits for a redress of grievances, and (b) they can boycott those
businesses whose practices they find heinous. It is quite possible for
consumers to destroy a bank or a credit bureau, if they band together and
decide that the cost of doing business with that institution is not worth
the benefit. Businesses, even very big businesses, with billions of dollars
in revenue and millions with which to lobby in Washington, fail routinely
when their customers decide they are not delivering sufficient value for
the price of their products.

3. The transaction that occurs when a customer willingly exchanges
information concerning their personal veracity to repay a loan with a
business that is accepting a financial risk in granting the loan is a free
exchange of value for value made between responsible, consenting entities.
The bank wants to loan the money in order to obtain the interest and
thereby secure a profit. The individual wants the loan in order to use the
money to obtain something they deem of value. No one can force the customer
to offer the information, and no one can force the bank to issue the loan.
It must be a willing transaction among free, autonomous traders. I utterly
reject the notion that individuals have no choice in the matter or that
they are not responsible for what they disclose in such transactions. That
is nonsense. When I enter into such transactions, I know full well what I
am disclosing. And I must decide if the potential "cost" of such disclosure
is worth the "value" I receive in exchange.

4. This transaction among traders is quite unlike ANYTHING the state does,
where the transaction is NOT among free traders, but represents extortion,
at the point of a gun, under the threat of death or imprisonment, should
the individual fail to comply, for whatever reason, with the demands of the
state. The legitimate concern over the nature and magnitude of state power
is not paranoiac or irrational. It is the concern that motivated the
founders to draft the U.S. Constitution in the first place, to, as
Jefferson said, "bind down from mischief" those we must necessarily entrust
with this corrupting power backed by guns and imprisonment.

5. The failure to make the distinction between the coercive power of the
state and the transactional/trader relationship in business is a cardinal
error of many on both the left and the right. Business, including big
business, is not the threat that many make it out to be. The real threat to
privacy and many other liberties is the unchecked growth of government, and
the reliance on government to solve social problems. Indeed, government
creates the problem (e.g. by imposing irrational and essentially
unenforceable prohibition laws concerning drugs), and then steps in to
violate in devastating ways the privacy and rights of all individuals
(under a utilitarian principle that we must sacrifice the rights or
liberties of a few in order to benefit the many), in order to enforce a law
on individual behavior that never should have been imposed in the first
place.

  Bruce...you may label this stuff "politics" (it is no more "political"
than rantings about banks and credit bureaus and what you think the
government should do to provide a state solution to 'solve the problem'),
and you can label it 'paranoiac' (it is no more 'paranoiac' than the most
sensible of our forefathers were who drafted the Constitution), and you can
call me an 'idiot' because you don't like what I say or you lack the
motivation to investigate a link, but none of that alters the facts of the
matter. The real threat to privacy, and every other liberty, is NOT
business. The real threat lies in Washington, in a government that is
bloated, full of waste and abuse, and has quite effectively and almost
totally slipped the carefully constructed bonds that our forefathers wove
into the Constitution.

  -- GP