Big Brother Wants to Know All About You: The American Community Survey

“This is Big Brother at its worst.”—Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX)
Over the past several years, I have been barraged with emails from Americans expressing their dismay over the American Community Survey, the latest census form to hit randomly selected households on a continuous basis. Unlike the traditional census, which collects data every ten years and is now underway, the American Community Survey is taken every year at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And at 28 pages (with an additional 16-page instruction packet), it contains some of the most detailed and intrusive questions ever put forth in a census questionnaire. These concern matters that the government simply has no business knowing, including a person’s job, income, physical and emotional health, family status, place of residence and intimate personal and private habits.
...the survey is not voluntary. Answering the questions is not a polite request from the Census Bureau. You are legally obligated to answer. If you refuse, the fines are staggering. For every question not answered, there is a $100 fine. And for every intentionally false response to a question, the fine is $500. Therefore, if a person representing a two-person household refused to fill out any questions or simply answered nonsensically, the total fines could range from upwards of $10,000 and $50,000 for noncompliance.

Clearly, this is not what the Founders intended. As Article I of the U. S. Constitution makes plain, the census is to be taken every ten years for the sole purpose of congressional redistricting. The Founders envisioned a simple head count of the number of people living in a given area so that numerically equal congressional districts could be maintained. There is no way that the Founders would have authorized the federal government to continuously demand, under penalty of law, such detailed information from the American people.


Thankfully, there are still some Americans out there who value freedom and recognize that it is time to stand up and fight back using whatever peaceful, nonviolent means are available to them.