Right now Senator Rand Paul is celebrating his victory in the Senate at causing the USA PATRIOT Act to expire. It is definitely a significant victory as a single Senator with the correct timing and the correct attitude can create a political victory.
But it will not stop NSA spying. Nor will it stop the use of the Act’s provisions to issue secret warrants against mostly drug dealers.
The fact is, the US Federal government bureaucracy has become a tool of external companies. This is largely due to the fact that regulators are often business leaders in the industry they regulate. So of course the agencies set up to regulate commerce or defense in this country are going to have significant ties to the multinational companies who profit from war, disease, and poverty.
So long as these agencies are basically run by outside influences with little to no Congressional oversight, it means that nothing will change with the passing of a law or the decree of an executive order.
So while this is a political victory for Sen. Rand Paul, it is a hollow one. These programs are not going to just stop because a judge and a Senator said they need to. No, they will continue unofficially and off the books with even less possibility of Congressional oversight than before.
I was a conservative until I started to discover the outright cronyism in government. Then I realized that the Left was spot on in their criticism of big corporations. Their solutions just sucked and wouldn’t work.
And so now I’m more libertarian-leaning but not libertarian because of its Utopian visions for society. The truth is, our government has been hijacked by large corporations who seek to create their own world order that doesn’t necessarily conform to the individual’s peaceful lifestyle.
And while they haven’t been herding us into massive death camps (yet), the principles that they operate by are not conservative (socially or otherwise), unconstitutional, and downright evil in many cases. The only real “solution” is to eliminate the bureaucracies entirely and make these multinational companies engage in actual competition on the free market.
Until that happens, any measures to reduce the size and scope of the Federal government are merely just window dressing.