I have never once nor will I ever complete a census form and (sadly for our country and state) I do fully expect to be put on some government no-fly list or other watch list as a result.

The fact of the matter is that the government does not keep their snooping busybody information gathering private. They A) sell info. to private businesses for profit (as they've done countless times in the past) B) they can and will use the information to incriminate you on a number of matters that they promise that they won't. (as they've done countless times in the past) C) The information could easily eventually be made public with some freedom of information act ruling. (as has happened in the past) D) They insist on your cell-phone # so they can call and harass you if they believe that your info. doesn't match unemployment filings, tax records, immigration records, etc, and then they catch you in a lie and they don't bust you for the actual responses on the census but rather bust you for obstruction of justice.

In my opinion the government has no need to conduct this research. It is an absolute waste of time and money (billions).

The surprising (but in retrospect utterly predictably) dissonance among right wing populists on this is classic, particularly the charge that the Census is a terrible waste of time and money.

I realize a bunch of you guys are probably college aged or younger, so I'm going to date myself here and return back to the late 1990s, when once upon a time all those coastal elites, liberals, and other inauthentic phonies with their fancy high school degrees (all the way up to the Clinton administration) noticed the same problem (Census is a waste of time and money) and concocted this liberal egghead scheme of not bothering to actually count people (because it's a big waste of time and money) but instead just use sampling to fulfill the Constitutional requirements to count the population.

Of course, at the time, the right wing populists, "strict Constitutionalists", and anti-government tardo culture waged another War of Hysteria on America and claimed it was all just a giant plot to count black people 10 billion times and count white people as 3/5th of a person, and to steal all the white peoples money and hand it over to welfare queens via Census sampling rigging, and that The Only True and Legal and Moral Way to count people in the US is to do what the Census Bureau does now, which is waste time and money enumerating everyone. Because THINK OF THE CONSTITUTION, IT DOESNT SAY THE WORD SAMPLING ANYWHERE IN THERE, THEREFORE SAMPLING IS ILLEGAL AND THE TOOL OF THE DEVIL.

Of course, fast forward ten years, and now the same crowd (whose fear mongering more or less successfully defeated sampling as a means to conduct the Census to save time and money) are now back to crowing about what a grave injustice and drastic threat to freedom and money theft and time waste the Census Bureau's practices are. Practices which we deemed as Right, Moral, and Necessary and Oh-So-Constitutional by more or less the same people just a decade ago who now wonder aloud why the government bothers following the Constitution in a way they demanded the last time around.

I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. Just a little bit.

Wait who do you think are right wing populists ITT?

epic tilting at windmills itt

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I think I caught them all, but it's a busy thread.

This seem like a pretty dumb/weird thing to take a stand on just imho.

edit : also a weird topic for a "dvaut gonna dvaut" too

It isn't a left or right thing. I've been opposed to the census out of principle since I was 10 years old. I hate left wingers as much as I hate right wingers but it is generally the former that insist on a coerced information gathering of a citizenry. Every single census thus far the boundaries are drawn out at the beginning and those boundaries are judicially demolished every single time. They ALWAYS say that the census information cannot be used against you in criminal matters, immigration matters, tax matters yet EVERY SINGLE year the judiciary allows special special circumstances for this information to be used as incriminating. It is a joke ...... We know exactly how many kids are needed for schools they show up and register every gd year..... This BS is not to know how many schools we need it is too keep tags on human cattle

WTF how am I a right wing populist?

The constitutional "arguments" against the census ITT are laughably bad. First, notice that the Article I Section 2 provision (referenced a couple times) providing for the census ("enumeration") is repealed and superseded by the 14th Amendment provision: "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed."

More important, though, is the constitutional reasoning. The argument is apparently that the fact that the Constitution provides for a census in a particular context implies that the only information that may be collected when the census is taken is a count. Evidently, because the census is taken in connection with apportionment of representatives, the government is limited to a count for those purposes. But this does not explain why the government may not ask questions to which it does not legally compel a response in connection with the census. Why is the government limited in its collection of information at census time when it is otherwise free to request information from its citizens? While surely the government may not argue that the census directive authorizes the collection of this information, it need not make that argument. Other powers authorize the collection of information anyway.

Protesting the census on constitutional grounds is tomfoolery, and protesting it on moral grounds seems like a colossal waste of effort. The only reasonable suggestions regarding why one might not respond to the census are pure laziness and hatred of filling out forms.

Yes, but apparently that makes one a right wing populist.

Duh!

Notice that I took the time (upon a pointless request) to document the hilariously stupid complaints about the Census that are borne out of right wing populism ("all the monies wasted! slavery! producers being stolen from and given to the leeches!") but have nothing at all to do with lazy people who don't want to fill out forms. In fact I granted that was probably the best reason among the bunch in post #35.

Re:

No one has really made any, aside from "lolzzzz they never follow the Constitution before, but lolz now they start", which I guess is some bit of sarcasm which I don't exactly understand so I pretty much have been ignoring it, even though the sentiment has been expressed a couple of times. I mean I understand that yes, the government has violated the Constitution in the past, and yes, in counting people and tallying the results every 10 years they're following it, but what I don't understand is what this has to do with Census.

Other than that, I haven't really seen any other arguments about the law ITT, other than the standard "it just sayz count the peoplez!!! lolz toilets!!!", which yeah is absurd, but no one really ran with it.

dogwhistle imo

lol

"I heard a right wing populist say this once" = borne out of right wing populism.

EVERYONE TIPS YOU'RE DUMB IF YOU DON'T

Well it is compulsory unpaid labor. I don't use language like the state controlling a large fraction of my productivity is slavery, but I don't think it is unreasonable that people do. I don't see how it is unreasonable for taso to say something like "not filling out the census form makes me less of a state slave." It seems true enough, if only in a small way.

To be for a coerced consensus is also to be for the punishment of those who choose to opt out of the survey. Are you really for the criminal prosecutions or fines for those who choose to voluntarily opt out of a big brother information gathering scheme?

Sure, but I think mjkidd has consistently held that his position is that he doesn't want to answer it because he hates filling out forms and is lazy. He's merely said that he understands, on a psychological level, why people might be inclined to claim that a legal requirement for filling out a form is a small sort of slavery - and you know that, coming from him, this is not "right wing populism" but rather a byproduct of (comprehension of) anarchist views. I am not saying I agree that the census is slavery or think that is a reasonable claim, just suggesting that lumping mjkidd's thoughts as "right wing populism" misrepresents his overall position.

The latter is the constitutional argument I was debunking, of course, and I'd seen that particular meme repeated enough times to think it warranted clarification. It's very easy to misrepresent even very straightforward constitutional issues, and I wanted the correct reasoning to exist somewhere in this otherwise dimly lit thread.

BTW, it's pretty obvious that sampling is constitutional as a method of taking the census.

Tell it to Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Breyer and O'Connor imo:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-404.ZS.html

In sum, the Commerce Dept. can sample to do most stuff, except for the purposes of congressional apportionment, which as we know is pretty much why the Census matters.

I don't see a statement that sampling is unconstitutional, only that Congress may constitutionally prohibit sampling as a method of enumeration for apportionment, as they did in the Census Act. Note:

You're right. I later read beyond what I quoted (crazy, I know) and SCOTUS explicitly ignores the Constitutional question because they think it's clear the Census Act prohibits it.

My edit makes your post look silly, sorry.

Yeah... great job catching me dvaut. I was a huge right wing populist when I was 3 years old.

I couldn't imagine your argument getting any worse, but it just did.

Is he even an anarchist? I mean I don't "know" what you claim I know at all.

We can't even argue the merits of his silly claim that the Census form = some sort of slavery, because you don't want to defend them, so we're essentially arguing whether or not his motivation for claiming it's slavery is due to his laziness, which is actually pretty bizarre, since there's a whole host of things you or I or he might not want to do due to laziness but no one would ever call slavery. It's intentionally charged and demagogic language to frame the debate in a style that combines right-wing ideology ("government is trampling all over our rights!") with populist propaganda and campaigning ("those elites in Washington are making you fill out their red tape!"). Otherwise known as right wing populism.

The notion that people would just happen to stumble on "slavery" as their word of choice to describe what the Census is because they're offended by the effort required, as if it's some happy accident, is basically absurd. Of course it's right wing populism.

Frankly, it's difficult to keep track of who holds what positions since people change their minds, but by my last count mjkidd is part of the anarchist contingent of the forum. I personally have backed off that position since realizing that many of the claimed differences between an AC society and the status quo exist in name only. I'm much more interested in probing the relationship between legal assignments of rights and economic efficiency, and I still tend to be pro-market, pro-privacy, and anti-war (libertarian). In case you were curious.