No Census Con

Towards the end of the eighteenth century our forefathers, who had successfully ended rule by an hereditary monarchy and replaced it with a republican form of government, came up against what seemed to them to be an all but insurmountable disagreement.

The thirteen colonies that had called their alliance "the united States of America" were extremely jealous of their individual sovereignty.

In fact the previous sentence provides good evidence of this anxiety in that it contains no misprint. Look at a copy of the Declaration of Independence and you will discover that the proclamation is made on behalf of the States of America. The word "united" in the title is a mere, lower case modifier -- given no more prominence than the number "thirteen" which precedes it.

At the time Mr. Madison, et al., were debating the formation of our second (and current) government under what would become the Constitution of the United States, our country was much more analogous to the contemporary combination NATO and European Economic Union than the omnipotent central leviathan we have now.

Indeed, up until Reconstruction, the name of our country was a plural noun (i.e., one would say "The United States are..." not "The United States is..."). Even after the "u" graduated to upper case.

The impasse for those who wished to replace our first central government with a new and stronger one was over how to apportion representation in the legislative branch. The more populous states argued that relative power should reflect the relative distribution of the people to be represented. The smaller states would not permit their individual sovereignty to be trumped by the sheer weight of numbers represented by their larger sisters.

Finally, "the Great Compromise" was struck whereby the legislature would consist of two, separate bodies with all legislation having to pass through both. One, called the Senate, would give all states equal representation. The other, called the House of Representatives, would be apportioned according to population.

It was in order to make certain that this second body would continue to fairly reflect the distribution of population in the young and growing land that there would be a census at the beginning of every decade.

It is the 21st such census that is now underway.

Many people, having endured incessant blathering over the last few months by census officials, mostly about getting our "fair share" of federal loot, may be surprised to learn that apportioning representation in Congress is the only constitutional purpose of the census.

Thus, the only relevant census question is: How many people are living at this address?

The necessity of redetermining appropriate representation in congress among the states is not advanced by telling the government whether you are a homeowner or renter, your gender, age, or race.

Indeed, this last question is downright offensive. There is nothing but mischief to be made of classifying people by race. And there is very grave danger in it.

Our federal government finally managed to recognize the ugliness of counting each African-American as three fifths of person (another deal struck by Madison & Co. at the constitutional convention) and eliminated that particular travesty. But they apparently missed the history of racial classifications in this century by such governments as Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.

And if you think this is an exaggeration or only happened in other countries, ask census officials what their guarantees of confidentiality meant to the Japanese-Americans who were rounded up and put into American concentration camps based on data their agency supplied to the army.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of bureaucrats do not have sinister intent. However, they are by their very nature obsessively nosy. They just couldn't pass up the decennial opportunity to pry into our personal lives.

One in six households will get the even more obnoxious "long form" that includes more than 50 questions, ranging from the merely intrusive, such as what you do for a living and how much you make doing it, to the ludicrous, such as how many toilets you have and whether you take a ferry to work.

Since there is no constitutional authority for any of this, the snoops in Washington DC have passed statutory requirements that you answer all of their questions.

13 USC 221 provides for fines up to $100 for anyone who "refuses or willfully neglects...to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him." Anyone "who willfully gives any answer that is false" can be fined up to $500.

So, my wife and I will answer the first question on our census form: "Two."

And since we don't wish to break the law, we'll answer all the rest of the questions: "None of your business."

That way we won't be willfully neglecting to answer. Nor will our answers be false.

Tim O'Brien is the Executive Director of the Libertarian Party of Michigan.