Observance of Civil Liberties - Research Paper Example

Reasons for trusting the government include 1. It is the government that ensures that civil liberties are maintained. 2. Access to justice is also provided by governments. 3. In certain socialist countries, the government provides its citizens with healthcare and education, and other basic living requirements. 4. Government is what causes cohesion in a country and creates public order. 5. In case of an outbreak of war, governments protect their people.

Reasons for not trusting the government include 1. Governments are often busy working for their own economic benefit, ignoring the public’s needs. 2. Governments have been known to lie to their subjects for whatever reasons, even when going to a war, such propaganda is all the more effective because the government can reach all spheres of life to spread it. 3. Often the government tries to cover up its wrongdoing, thus ensuring that justice is not meted out to the injured parties. 4. Moreover, it is often the corporations that have a firm hold over government policy, whether through financial contributions or by having their own agents and lobbyists, and it is not exactly public interest that is behind most of the various rulings of the government, but the interests of these corporations. 5. Governments can if there are not enough checks and balances keeping them in line, unilaterally take back all the rights that the public had.

Whatever the public outcome of such an act, it would be immaterial if the government was trusted so much that it had no effective checks and balances system. I asked two of my friends about my list of reasons both for trusting and not trusting the government, encouraging them to comment on it and giving me reasons for their comments as well. The first friend agreed to both my reasons in favour of trusting the government as well as those in favour of not trusting the government. Her point of view was that when it comes to trusting and/or distrusting the government, it is a very difficult balance to maintain.

On the one hand, she said, the government could provide us with a lot of basic services, like medical, education and security, because of the fact that it has immense wherewithal to be everywhere and help in such things, but on the other hand, exactly because of the fact that the government’s presence is everywhere it can become very hard for us to lead our private lives in peace. Government officials have been known to abuse the powers that are given to them. In a way, she said, the trust we have for the government is a double-edged sword, we are to distrust the government, she said, for the very same reasons that we are to trust them.

The other friend of mine was actually quite critical of my reasons for trusting the government. According to him, it was apparent that with the power and authority that we were giving to the government today, the government had ended up taking over our lives. Going through each of my reasons to trust the government, he told me how the government is not to be trusted. Stating that while it is true that it is the responsibility of the government to provide access to justice as well as to ensure our civil liberties are not trampled upon, yet it is often the government itself that takes back these rights of our under one pretext or another.

He gave the recent example of the Patriot Act, stating how it has resulted in our civil liberties being compromised. Moreover, he said that even though the government is considered responsible for causing cohesion in the country, yet it is the vested interests of those involved in the government that actually end up creating a divisive environment for the public in order to serve their own agendas. Moreover, he said that precisely because the government was responsible for fighting our wars, and even waging them, that we were not to trust them as often the governments caused our troops to go into wars for falsified reasons.