Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Rationing severely restricted Americans’ freedom to purchase the type and amount of goods they desired, and also resulted in a black market for rationed goods.19 It also reinforced the federal government’s power over individuals. It was utterly unnecessary. All the rationed goods could be bought for three or four times the government-set price on the black market. Without rationing, market forces would have established the prices at far less than what the black market did. Needless to say, rationing did not apply to the federal government. FDR and Congress had all the typewriters, sugar, coffee, milk, and vehicles they wanted. Americans accepted this like sheep.

The government also saw fit to strip ethnic Japanese of their liberty after the Pearl Harbor attacks. On February 19th 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast of the United States.20 Congress later passed a law imposing criminal penalties on people who violated the order or the regulations issued pursuant to it.21 Through its new, self-created authority, the government systematically took away the freedom of Japanese-Americans, just as it did in the previous century to African-Americans.

Initially, curfews were imposed.22 Then, Japanese-Americans were required to report to relocation centers.23 Finally, they were physically moved to concentration camps.24 Gordon Hirabayashi of Washington State was a Japanese-American who, in May 1942, violated curfew and two days later failed to report to register for evacuation.25 Hirabayashi was prosecuted and convicted in federal court for violating the government’s curfew and evacuation order.26

In Hirabayashi v. United States,27 the first significant case involving Executive Order 9066, Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone wrote the opinion of the court. In order to limit the Court’s task, Stone decided that the Court need only rule on the curfew requirement and could omit discussing the requirement that Hirabayashi report to a relocation28 Stone was able to do this because Hirabayashi was to serve center. his sentences for each offense concurrently; he was to serve only three months in prison, even though he was sentenced to two, three-month sentences.29 The Court ruled 6 to 3 that curfews were permissible because the nation was at war with the Japanese.30 According to Stone, “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are . . . odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. . . .”31 Nevertheless, Stone ruled that discrimination was justified in this case, because “the danger of espionage and sabotage, in time of war and of threatened invasion, calls upon the military authorities to scrutinize every relevant fact bearing on the loyalty of populations in the danger areas. . . .”32

The Supreme Court had another chance to dismantle the “hysteria” law that was Executive Order 9066, but instead, it validated government regulations that were even more destructive to freedom. In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the government could ship Japanese-Americans off to desert internment camps under the guise that it was a valid security measure. The tremendous racism, xenophobia, and unconstitutional acts that permeated this decision were ignored at the time, because of fear.

Sensationalism accompanied the fear people had about the risk of Japanese-Americans acting as spies for the Japanese government. At the time, nearly all Americans who were not of Japanese ancestry seemed to support the mass jailing of about 120,000 men, women, elderly, and young children. This was in spite of the fact that about two-thirds of the Japanese people brought to the camps were native-born United States citizens.33

Justice William Francis (“Frank”) Murphy, an FDR appointee to the Court and one of two justices dissenting in Korematsu, believed that there were limits to military discretion, and he would not submit to what he saw as a clear instance of government abuse. He declared that incarcerating people because of membership in a group that is an immutable attribute of birth “goes over ‘the very brink of constitutional power,’ and falls into the ugly abyss of racism.” Justice Murphy warned that “[r]acial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life.”

He believed that by reasoning that all Japanese people are potentially disloyal to the United States based on the disloyalty of some Japanese individuals, the federal government had adopted “one of the cruelest of the rationales used by our enemies to destroy the dignity of the individual and to encourage and open the door to discriminatory actions against other minority groups in the passions of tomorrow.” His words resonate powerfully today, when similar xenophobic sentiments motivate some to doubt the lawful behavior of Muslim-Americans due to the hysteria after 9/11.

Although many, like Justice Murphy, eventually recognized the internment camps as an atrocity and trampling of rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment, the decision in Korematsu was never overruled; which means that it still stands as the precedent for cases involving the incarceration of Americans in the name of national security. Moreover, in the post-9/11 environment, it seems, at least superficially, that most Americans are reluctant to continue the legacy left by the Korematsu case. One commentary about racial profiling after September 11th 2001, argues:

The tension between national security and civil liberties is taken for granted. Yet the national security side of the equation is speculative and rests on the familiar warning that if this war is lost there will be no rights or liberties for anybody at all. Even those who embraced color blindness, primarily in attacks on racial remedies, have given up their beliefs. Whatever the pros and cons of racial profiling, color blindness and racial profiling are inherently incompatible.34

In climates of hysteria, it seems that none of our liberties is off limits to the government. Even more vitally, individuals need to be vigilant, recognize, and react when the government is taking away rights—especially those of minority groups, be they racial, ethnic, or religious—that have absolutely nothing to do with security and everything to do with government abuse of