Tyranny of Information

Again, I have been remiss in my duties. However, I've allowed some (disjointed) thoughts to brew over the past several days.
As we are all tired of hearing, we live in the "information age". What distinguishes this age from previous ages is the easy flow of information. Early on, minarchists like myself were excited about this prospect, as this meant that there was a method of exchanging information that could not be moderated by the state. This was a heady feeling, as man could finally be liberated from oppressive regimes. Information would, like a strong current, flow with great force into the dams built by the state across our ability to know, and break them down, flooding the world with truth.
Nowadays, I'm reconsidering this thesis for a number of reason. First is the continuing trend against privacy. Personal liberty is seen in the modern world not as a gift from the Almighty, but rather a nice little fluff, a mere privilege that might be revoked for greater expediency. Indeed, the over-riding factor has become expediency.
Another over-riding factor is security. People in the modern world fear death more than any other thing. As a result, they trade everything else in order to buy a little more time. Like the proverbial appeasers trying to escape the crocodile, they toss everything and everyone else at the beast they fear in order to ensure that it consumes them last. Then, with nothing between them and the beast, it comes straight for them.
When you combine expediency with fear of death, you have the chief neurosis of the modern world. It's expressed in two ways- the security fears, which are openly manifested. You read about this every day, with such famous affronts to liberties as the infamous USA-PATRIOT act, and the recently passed de facto national ID cards in the REAL ID act. There's a good article reviewing this odious legislation here.
Aside from the obvious security clampdown on liberties, there's the more subtle and more insidious health angle. I've already crafted a rant concerning the manifold dangers of socialised medicine. One of the points I made was my fear that the government would turn into the ultimate HMO, mandating exercise, diet, and other sundry requirements for citizens.
Of course, after the disaster of HillaryCare in the mid nineties, one might be tempted to say such a programme is doomed from the get-go. Indeed, one might be correct, but that doesn't mean the problems of a socialised health care system will go away. Indeed, the bureaucrats might be more clever than I previously figured, and might take the REAL-ID approach. Here's a hypothetical situation.
After a prolonged media scare about companies not providing health insurance, the federal government passes laws mandating corporate health insurance policies for all employees. Such laws are not big programmes, and can be inserted into omnibus spending bills (as the REAL-ID act was). By doing this, congress has created a de facto national health care system, and by setting uniform standards they've become a the big, bad HMO without spending a nickel.
Companies, anxious to preserve their money, mandate minimum health standards for employees. Smokers, overweight people, and people with congenital diseases that represent a health risk become effectively unemployable, because companies will not want to take a risk for these groups.
At this point, you must be thinking "you crazy white devil! This is another one of your paranoid fever-dreams. No company would fire people for their behaviour on personal time!" You'd be wrong in this case - things like this are already happening.
I read in to-day's edition of USA Today an article which set me upon this course- many companies ban employees from smoking at all in order to save on the cost of health insurance! Sadly, the print article was not on the USA Today website, but here's a case that is very much like it.
Now, with businesses being competitive, corporations that do not partake in this will be beaten in competition by those that do. Their health-care costs will hamstring them. Furthermore, insurance providers might refuse to give insurance at all to companies that employ the new generation of lepers.
Of course, it is conceivable that genetic engineering and eugenics of some sort will be used to weed out undesirable workers. What sort of parents, after all, want to be saddled with unemployable children?
But that's another future-nightmare scenario. The fact is that we can easily be indirectly deprived of our rights without democratic debate or direct legislation. It's really quite clever, if insidious.
Normally, people like me view capital as an agent of liberation- a means by which man can be freed from purely physical toil and instead use his mind to make money to exchange for goods. Free flow of capital allows man to spend on anything he wants, giving the impression of a free society.
However, when it gets out of control, expediency determines the best choice, and things that reduce expediency, such as privacy and rights, become mere luxuries rather than essential things, with a premium price.
It's rather like how insurance has reduced our freedom. For example, many of the most odious an restrictive measures levied against my ability to do what I will are not passed by government, but rather by insurance agents. Plus, they aren't limited in the type of information they take because the contract with the insured is a private one, not in the domain of protected rights.
Information-gathering companies such as Equifax gather incredible amounts of information about everyone, and every aspect of our behaviour.
It seems that this unprecedented ability to gather information is eroding our rights, and there's not much to be done about it. The lack of virtue and love of expediency in modern society combine to harm man yet again.