By Selwyn Duke

A reader sent me an interesting piece on the "American Community Survey" (ACS), a 24-page, highly intrusive census questionnaire (perhaps you’ve heard of it).  This Orwellian bureaucratic nightmare is sent out annually, and the fines for failing to respond honestly can amount to, get the Digitalis, $50,000.

Writes John W. Whitehead, the piece’s author:

The questions, as Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has said, are “both ludicrous and insulting.” For example, the survey asks how many
persons live in your home, along with their names and detailed
information about them such as their relationship to you, marital
status, race and their physical, mental and emotional problems, etc.
The survey also asks how many bedrooms and bathrooms you have in your
house, along with the fuel used to heat your home, the cost of
electricity, what type of mortgage you have and monthly mortgage
payments, property taxes and so on. This questionnaire also demands to
know how many days you were sick last year, how many automobiles you
own and the number of miles driven, whether you have trouble getting up
the stairs and, amazingly, what time you leave for work every morning.
With the power of government agents under the USA Patriot Act to
secretly come into your home and rifle through your personal belongings
without a search warrant, it is dangerous to let the government know
when you will not be at home.

However, that’s not all. The
survey combines asinine questions with highly detailed inquiries about
your financial affairs. And the survey demands that you violate the
privacy of others by supplying the names and addresses of your friends,
relatives and employer. The questionnaire also demands that you give
other information on the people in your home, such as their educational
levels, how many years of school were completed, what languages they
speak and when they last worked at a job, among other things.

It should go without saying that demanding such answers is quintessentially un-American.  And I’ll now echo what I wrote in my piece "A Foolproof Tax Plan."  If a stranger asked you the questions in the ACS or that the IRS asks every year — for instance, how much money you earned — what would your answer be?  If you’re like the average person, you’d say, "None of your business."  Yet, strangers working within the context of government ask us such things every year and we divulge the information like good sheeple.

Unfortunately, we have been conditioned to accept a level of intrusiveness that would have made the Founding Fathers utter only three words: Lock and load.  The government has no right to such a window into our private lives.

Really, though, our federal government has been trampling the Constitution — the supreme law of the land — egregiously for half a century now; thus, it is sad but true that it rendered itself illegitimate a long time ago. 

It is because of this that one of our few good statesmen — one of the few even worthy of the designation "statesman" — Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., has yearly been introducing what has been named the Enumerated Powers Act (HR 1359).  In a nutshell, it states that any law or act of Congress must be accompanied by an explanation of what element of the Constitution allows for that law or act. 

Not surprisingly, the bill still only has 28 co-sponsors.  Why?  Quite simply because the politicians know that virtually all of their proposals are illegal under the Constitution. 

Yes, sadly, our Constitution is "living," and our republic is dying.