The Census: Inquiring Minds Want to Know a Lot
What Is the Real Purpose of the Census?
What the federal bureaucracy calls “the largest peacetime mobilization effort in U.S. history” is now underway. It’s the 2000 census—and if you’re an American citizen, it’s got a few questions for you. As many as 53, in fact.
America’s founders felt it was important enough to know how many people lived in the country that they wrote a requirement for a census every ten years into the third paragraph of Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution. For the important purpose of apportioning representation in the House of Representatives, that passage specifies that the federal government, under the direction of the Congress, shall count the number of people—period.
The first census in 1790 included a question about race and residence, but that was about the sum of it. In the intervening 213 years, the census has morphed into much more than a head count. Indeed, it may now be the clearest index available of the growth and intrusiveness of the federal establishment.
In mid-March, a census “short form” was mailed to nearly every American. Its seven questions are designed to find out the recipient’s name, age, sex, race, relationship to household, whether or not the recipient is His panic, and whether his housing is owned or rented. One in six households were mailed the “long form”—a 53-query marathon of nosy inquiries about everything from disabilities to employment to income. Answering the census is not an option; under the law, it’s mandatory.
The folks who devised the long form are particularly interested in your house. They want to know how many rooms it has, when it was built, where you get your water, what your utilities cost, how you financed it, and how many cars, telephones, and bathrooms you’ve got. Other questions on the long form ask about your education, health, job, and ride to work (to find out if you drive a car or take a bus). To borrow a line from a famous tabloid ad, “inquiring minds want to know.”
The more important question that cries out to be asked, however, is just why do these inquiring minds want to know all these things? Who and where you are is now a minor part of this decennial exercise; the census these days is much more about how to divide the loot. The U.S. Census Bureau isn’t bashful about admitting this in its literature:
Census 2000 will be the information cornerstone for the next century. Billions of dollars of federal, state, and local funds will be spent on thousands of projects across our nation. How and where that money is spent depends on how accurate the census count is . . . . Twenty-two of the 25 largest Federal funding grant programs of fiscal year 1998 are responsible for $162 billion being distributed to state, local, and tribal governments, and about half of this money was distributed using formulas involving census population data, according to a report by the General Accounting Office. We expect that at least $182 billion will be distributed annually based on formulas using Census 2000 data.
Bureaucrats and central planner wannabes aren’t the only folks who want to use the census to learn a lot about you. In between each count, the Census Bureau is besieged with requests from private interests who want to get their pet questions baked into the next one at taxpayer expense. Marketing and health research people want data on behavior and ailments. Internet service firms want to know who’s wired and who isn’t. Sociologists push to find out more about who’s going to which church, and which individuals are providing support to their grandparents. Maybe we owe Congress and the bureaucracy a little appreciation for resisting most of the litany of requests and keeping their questions on the long form to a “mere” 53.
It all reminds me of the wisdom of Frederic Bastiat, the great French statesman and philosopher who wrote in his magnificent primer on the proper function of government, The Law: “As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose—that it may violate property instead of protecting it—then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.”
That a head count is no longer the primary focus of the census was dramatically illustrated by a proposal from the Clinton administration. In the run-up to the 2000 census, the administration announced it wanted to incorporate something called “statistical sampling” into the counting method. Instead of trying to count each person the government would count people in 90 percent of American households and then on the basis of those numbers, make guesses and assumptions about the remaining 10 percent. Because a Republican Congress figured a Democratic administration would make guesses and assumptions that would boost the electoral prospects of its friends, statistical sampling was on the ropes until the Supreme Court landed the final blow and killed it several months ago.
Perhaps the focus on extraneous information has cut into the very accuracy of the count that is supposed to be the main purpose of the census. By its own estimates, the Census Bureau missed 1.6 percent of the U.S. population in 1990—worse than its performance ten years before. The government misses millions of people, but it wants to dole out their money based on such details as how many bathrooms they have.
While Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt says it’s your “civic duty” to complete the 2000 census form, not everybody thinks so. The Libertarian Party captured some headlines when its national director, Steve Dasbach, declared in January, “Real Americans don’t answer nosy Census questions. You can strike a blow for privacy, equality, and liberty by refusing to answer every question on the Census form except the one required by the Constitution: How many people live in your home?” Noting the real purpose of most of the long form’s queries, Dasbach said, “Census information is used to forge the chains that bind Americans to failed government programs, meddlesome bureaucracies, and sky-high tax rates.”
It’s not happenstance that as the government’s share of our income rises and its toll on our liberties grows, the census gets longer and more intrusive with each passing decade. It’s part of the package: a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you’ve got. To do all that for you and to you, it has to ask you lots and lots of questions.
Comment by lojasmo on 14 July 2009:
Actually, the constitution calls for enumeration…COMMA, and goes on to state that it shall be done “in a manner which they [congress] Shall direct. The long form is clearly constitutional, as it has been legislated by congress and signed by the president, as the constitution calls for.
Comment by lojasmo on 14 July 2009:
Furthermore, the 2000 long form was the shortest long form since 1940, so the claim that it “grows longer and more intrusive each passing decade” is clearly false.
Comment by Mike Van Winkle on 4 January 2010:
lojasmo, please note the date on this article is 2000 so there was no way for the author to know the 2000 long form would be the shortest ever.
Comment by Pearl on 4 January 2010:
According to lojasmo, Congress in collusion with the President, can do anything they want and it is automatically Constitutional. WRONG. The Constitution states the powers of Congress and the President, and this ain’t one of ‘em. I will tell them how many people live in my home…period.
Comment by Bryan Rubingh on 4 January 2010:
As lojasmo points out, the constitution states that the enumeration shall be done in a “manner”… The “manner” does not allow them to ask and do whatever they want. This means they may do it by hiring people to go door-to-door or they may do it by mail or by internet or satellite or…
Comment by Rick on 4 January 2010:
You can’t learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. ~Somerset Maugham
Either our Constitution stands for something and is worth fighting for, or it doesn’t.
Comment by Dr. Steve on 4 January 2010:
The census will be a great way to make “jobs”. Even more federal jobs, over paid almost by definition. And great timing for the fall election. Expect a bigger census form and lots of folks looking at what you put down in writting. And remember, this administration wants the census under the white house. Comforting thought, is it not?
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Comment by Geofantacist on 8 February 2010:
Throughout the years many people who refused to fill out census forms have been prosecuted, and virtually all have lost in court. Defenses have included right of privacy, hardship, illegal search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment, unlawful taking of property under the Fifth Amendment, and Constitutional challenges to the expansiveness of the questions (courts have held that the questions are authorized by statue). None have prevailed. I am aware, however, of no case (although there may have been one since I researched this matter several years ago) in which a defendant invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in the face of demands for information that could be used against him in a criminal proceeding. This right is very strong in that the person invoking it need not divulge how he believes such information might be used against him. He only needs to have a good-faith fear that he might be placed in jeopardy by providing information even if it were only as a link in a chain of evidence that could possibly lead to prosecution for a crime, ANY crime, not necessarily one having to do with the census in this case. In these days when nearly everything that isn’t illegal is mandatory, that fear is easily justified. To invoke one’s Fifth Amendment right properly on government questionaires, it must be used in response to each and every objectionable question, not as blanket objection to the questioning itself.
Comment by Capt. A. on 8 February 2010:
CENSUS? It’s nothing more than socialized people control. When Mencken once referred to the American booboisie, as brain-dead sheep, do you think filling out the U.S. Census form might have come to mind? As with so many other “ritualized” government programs whether “legal or illegal,” even brain-challenged morons soon come to understand that peculiar angst, “I sense experientially, the loss of my freedom, liberty, privacy and private property rights.” Or maybe the word “experiential” becomes moot after being subjected to the never-ending inherent tribal inculcation, the government-controlled school system and its nefarious propaganda. Census equals: Do, as you are told—or else! And guess what? That’s EXACTLY what the American majority will do—“fill out the census!” Under the lash of the master, (the U.S. government) the obeisant plebs will bend over, spread their nates and submit to the big bamboo, often … and without reflection, nary a critical thought in mind, ever. The U.S. Census is just another piece of bamboo. Shall we now speak of the IRS thugatarian’s socialized bamboo called “legalized plunder?” Capisce?
America is just another place to be—from.
C’est la guerre.
Capt. A.
Principaute de Monaco
GMT +1:00 CET
“Anyone who needs to be persuaded to be free, doesn’t deserve to be.” ~ L. Neil Smith
Comment by Jon T. on 8 February 2010:
Libertarian Party national director Steve Dasbach suggested that we “can strike a blow for privacy, equality, and liberty by refusing to answer every question on the Census form except the one required by the Constitution: How many people live in your home.” I would absolutely love to follow through on this suggestion were it not for 13 USC 221:
“Whoever … refuses or willfully neglects … to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in connection with any census or survey … shall
be fined not more than $100. … Whoever … willfully gives any answer that is false, shall be fined not more than $500.”
What now?
Comment by Geofantacist on 8 February 2010:
If a blow for privacy, equality and liberty isn’t worth the risk of a $100 fine, you don’t deserve to be free. I repeat: the Fifth Amendment is your shield. Use it, pray that the Feds prosecute, and then be prepared to bask in the glow of having established case law in support of freedom!
Comment by Jon T. on 9 February 2010:
I am in no way attempting to legitimize or defend the government’s position on compelled census participation, I am simply looking at this from a legal standpoint. I am no lawyer, but I find it difficult to conceive a scenario in which the Fifth Amendment would give just cause to overturn a prosecution.
According to the court in In re Curtis: “The invocation of the Fifth Amendment privilege, standing alone, is not sufficient evidence to constitute probative proof.” (177 B.R. 717) Furthermore, a claim of Fifth privilege is only valid when there is “a sufficient hazard of incrimination” to uphold the assertion. Information is incriminating in nature only if it directly supports a criminal conviction, or would furnish a link in the chain of evidence that could lead to prosecution, or an individual reasonably believes it could be used against him in a criminal prosecution.
I think I would rather attack the prosecution from the standpoint of compulsory participation being unconstitutional by violation of authority.
Comment by John Galt on 9 February 2010:
This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I’m the man who’s taken away your victims and thus destroyed your world.
You have no obligation to answer the door or answer any questions. Why answer the door for thugs or busy bodies? Why cooperate with your own kidnapping, imprisonment, or identification for the next chapter in death camps in America. Or did you learn nothing from the Japanese Americans being interred as a result of giving up their locations in the 1940 census?
You know that you can’t give away everything and starve yourself. You’ve forced yourselves to live with undeserved, irrational guilt. Is it ever proper to help another man? No, if he demands it as his right or as a duty that you owe him. Yes, if it’s your own free choice based on your judgment of the value of that person and his struggle. This country wasn’t built by men who sought handouts. In its brilliant youth, this country showed the rest of the world what greatness was possible to Man and what happiness is possible on Earth.
Comment by Geofantacist on 9 February 2010:
The fact that judges can determine whether circumstances warrant invoking the 5th Amendment privilege shouldn’t deter someone who is legitimately in fear of incrimination. Remember, it was information from the 1940 census (name and address were sufficient) that the feds used to round up and incarcerate the Japanese during WWI. And that was before the government got really serious about defining so many things as crimes and otherwise relieving us of our liberty. The Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act come to mind. Nonetheless, John Galt may have the right idea–don’t answer the door.
Comment by Geofantacist on 9 February 2010:
…make that WWII.
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