We Are a Nation Built on Liberty, Not Safety

Today I had the opportunity to join Walker Wildmon on At the Core on American Family Radio to discuss the rise of Flock cameras across our nation. During that conversation we kept circling one word — surveillance — and whether America is quietly becoming a surveillance state. That question stayed with me long after the microphones went off, because underneath it is a much older question: are we a nation built on safety, or a nation built on liberty?

Listen to At the Core with Walker Wildmon on American Family Radio

Somewhere along the way, many Americans came to believe that the first duty of government is to keep us safe. It might be comforting idea, but it is a false one. Our founders did not build this country to shield us from every danger — they built it to shield us from the greatest danger of all, a government with too much power over its own people. So if you want to understand why cameras are quietly going up across Mississippi to photograph every car that passes, you first have to see that we have our own founding backward.

The men who built this country did not organize it around safety. They organized it around liberty. Read the Bill of Rights and you will notice something strange: it is almost entirely a list of things the government is forbidden to do — even when doing them would make us safer. Police cannot search your home without a warrant, though warrantless searches would surely catch more criminals. You cannot be silenced, though some speech is dangerous. You cannot be jailed on an accusation you are never allowed to face. Every one of those protections is a deliberate trade. The founders accepted more risk in exchange for more freedom. A nation built on safety would never have written such rules.

They did this on purpose. They had just thrown off a government that justified every intrusion — the general warrants, the standing armies, the soldiers in private homes — in the sacred name of order. They concluded that concentrated power was a bigger threat than disorder ever was. Patrick Henry did not say give me safety or give me death.

This is not a small distinction. It decides what kind of country we are. In a nation built on liberty, the government must justify itself to you. In a nation built on safety, you must justify yourself to the government. In the first, the citizen watches the state. In the second, the state watches the citizen.

Which brings us to the cameras. Flock license-plate readers and the new AI systems coming to our highways operate on one simple premise: photograph everyone, because anyone might be a criminal. That sentence is unthinkable in a country built on liberty and perfectly natural in one built on safety. When innocent Americans are pulled over at gunpoint because a camera misread a plate, that is not the system failing. That is a safety-first machine doing exactly what it was designed to do — sweep broadly and sort out the innocent later.

Here is the problem safety can never solve. It has no stopping point. There is always one more freedom to surrender for one more sliver of security, and then another after that. Liberty is the only principle that tells the government where it may not go, no matter how safe the alternative sounds.

Mississippi drew that line in 2009 when it banned automated traffic cameras. Seventeen years later, the state crossed its own line. Safety is the floor beneath a free people. It was never meant to be the ceiling above them.