The 1990 census arrived last week, along with the usual past due notices and Gold Card applications. I am one of the lucky Americans who received the long form, which asks for such inconsequential data as how much I earn, which of the myriad minorities I swear allegiance to, and how much money I spent on utilities. Even to track down the information would have taken several hours, and after reading through the form I could not find any mention of payment for my time and trouble. Besides, my children are something like one-thirty-second Native American, and I would not want any careless answer of mine to blight their prospects of joining the ever-growing class of minority victims.

I’ve been through all this before, back in 1980, when a census-taker with the long form tracked me down to my own God’s Little Acre in McClellanville, South Carolina. She was obviously a nice person, an unemployed schoolmarm, but I did not ask her in. Government agents are like the Devil: it is always safer not to invite them to step across your threshold. You see, she explained, all this apparently private information is really the government’s business, because they have to make plans and allocate resources. To do that, they have to determine where poor people, especially poor minorities, live.

I said then what I say now. I don’t want the government to allocate resources or to waste my tax money on government programs to help white social workers to enslave “minorities.” What is more, I am opposed on moral grounds to the whole idea of government statistics. As Murray Rothbard pointed out in a recent issue (Winter 1989) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, the federal government began collecting statistics in a big way only during the Progressive era. In World War I Edwin Gray rose to prominence as head of the statistical department of the War Trade Board and later as head of the Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics. The gathering of statistics was a crucial element in this first attempt to create a command economy in America. Small wonder that Gray saw what he called “that wretched Armistice” as “almost . . . a personal blow.” As Rothbard observed, Wilson’s planning boards were only the trial runs for FDR’s more ambitious experiment in social engineering.

The Census Bureau, however, assures me that it is my duty, as a good citizen to fill in the entire form. I believe in obeying the law, and as most of our readers must be aware I take a Lutheran view of civil disobedience and would repress nuclear protests and Operation Rescue with the rigor usually exercised against other revolutionaries.

However, conscientious refusal is not civil disobedience. If the government told me to kill my children or divorce my wife or compose atonal music, I would politely decline on the grounds that there is a higher law that we must obey and that our own civil order depends upon this higher law that has been acknowledged for several millennia. While I am not justified in breaking good laws to protest bad, I am required not to do those things I know are wrong. State socialism is worse than inefficient and repressive; it is, as I and many people believe, immoral. It makes war upon families and communities; it subverts the moral order; it corrupts the taste and deprives life itself of half its savor. State socialism depends upon statistics, graphs, and charts. The planners have to know how many bathrooms I have, if they are to tell me, some day, that I have exceeded my quota of bathrooms, water, and children. They have to know if I am white or black or Pacific Islander, before they can decide upon my official status. Once upon a time, it was enough to be free and a citizen. Now that liberty and citizenship have been emptied of meaning, the government is devising new status categories. At the top are the honestiores—corporate executives and government bureaucrats, while ordinary members of the working classes are now consigned to the lowest class of humiliores. From here it is only one step—as Hilaire Belloc argued long ago—to slavery.

And so for this reason and because toadying to statisticians and filling out forms and applications goes against my grain as a once-free American, I decline, for the second time, to fill out the census form. I do supply the information to which they are entitled by the Constitution: name, address, birth date. After all, even under the Geneva Convention a POW has to give name, rank, and serial number.