The big news of the day is that the Intelligence Services have supposedly foiled plots to blow-up flights from the UK in mid-air. Personally, I'm highly suspicious of these claims. This isn't the first time assertions of this nature have been made but no evidence is ever released to back this up.
Considering that we went to war with Iraq because the Intelligence Services had evidence that they had WMDs which could be fired onto foreign soil from moveable platforms in 45 mins. The same Intelligence Services who also shot dead John Charles De Menezes on the tube and in Forest Gate, London shot and arrested one man and arrested another for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks, in both cases they were mistaken (De Menezes had a backpack with electrical equipment in it, the 2 men were accused by a neighbour of being terrorists and were released without charge). I think there is justification for not taking these fresh reports seriously.
Based on my cynical thoughts I decided to do a little research into economies of fear and came across a very informative article by Robert Higgs entitled The Political Economy of Fear which sums up my thoughts quite nicely. I have pinched some of the key paragraphs and want to share them with you (the full article can be found at
www.mises.org).
"Fear is a depreciating asset. As Machiavelli observes, "the temper of the multitude is fickle, and ... while it is easy to persuade them of a thing, it is hard to fix them in that persuasion" ([1513 1992, 14). Unless the foretold threat eventuates, the people come to doubt its substance. The government must make up for the depreciation by investing in the maintenance, modernization, and replacement of its stock of fear capital. For example, during the Cold War, the general sense of fear of the Soviets tended to dissipate unless restored by periodic crises, many of which took the form of officially announced or leaked "gaps" between U.S. and Soviet military capabilities: troop-strength gap, bomber gap, missile gap, antimissile gap, first-strike-missile gap, defense-spending gap, thermonuclear-throw-weight gap, and so forth (Higgs 1994, 301–02).
[4] Lately, a succession of official warnings about possible forms of terrorist attack on the homeland has served the same purpose: keeping the people "vigilant," which is to say, willing to pour enormous amounts of their money into the government's bottomless budgetary pits of "defense" and "homeland security" (Higgs 2003b)."
"This same factor helps to explain the drumbeat of fears pounded out by the mass media: besides serving their own interests in capturing an audience, they buy insurance against government punishment by playing along with whatever program of fear-mongering the government is conducting currently. Anyone who watches, say, CNN's Headline News programs can attest that a day seldom passes without some new announcement of a previously unsuspected Terrible Threat—I call it the danger du jour."
"By keeping the population in a state of artificially heightened apprehension, the government-cum-media prepares the ground for planting specific measures of taxation, regulation, surveillance, reporting, and other invasions of the people's wealth, privacy, and freedoms. Left alone for a while, relieved of this ceaseless bombardment of warnings, people would soon come to understand that hardly any of the announced threats has any substance and that they can manage their own affairs quite well without the security-related regimentation and tax-extortion the government seeks to justify."
