Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

December 14, 2011

Sheriff Dwayne Price of Kentucky?s Johnson County recently made an interesting recruiting pitch. In an interview broadcast on a local news program, Sheriff Price offered to pay $100 to any local citizen willing either to buy drugs, or to sell them to their friends, neighbors, and interested strangers.

?Basically, what we need from the public to help combat [drug dealing] is we need some informants,? the Sheriff explained. ?Without community involvement, there is no way we can combat these drugs. We have to have community involvement.?

In addition to offering cash rewards for tips that lead to drug arrests, Price is looking to recruit undercover operatives, who will join a huge and ever-growing pool of paid government snitches.

Drug use is evil and self-destructive. A society honeycombed by government informants is much worse. An increasing reliance on state informants is a reliable symptom of tyranny. Imperial Rome, like imperial America, was lousy with informants who collaborated with corrupt, malicious prosecutors. Informants also played an indispensable role in modern totalitarian states.

The Declaration of Independence explicitly recognizes that governments destructive to individual liberty should be altered or abolished outright. Any government that pays its subjects to inform on each other certainly meets that description.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.