ESR wonders why SOPA seems to finally have woken up many people about their rapidly eroding liberties, but not all the other things the federal government has done:
A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you — including your Internet freedom.
That’s the thought that keeps running through my head as I contemplate the full-scale panic going on right now about SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act”.
It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill — awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.
But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs — cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it — and I have to wonder…
Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?
