Did the Jews in the Dachau Gas Chambers Thank Government for Protection from Power Companies?

In my business class yesterday I mentioned my distaste for government regulation. A recent concern is the National Security Agency's use of personal information to retaliate against American dissidents.  The NSA's actions are like  the Soviet Union's 20th century economic retaliation against its dissidents.  In a recent Reason Magazine article and the video above, William Binney, a former NSA official turned whistle blower, describes retaliation for his revealing the NSA's misuse of personal information about US citizens.

A student raised this point: "It is difficult to choose between regulation that suppresses competition and the absence of regulation that allows large firms to take advantage of individual citizens."  The trouble is that there is little evidence that large firms took advantage of citizens when there was no regulation.  There is little evidence that the benefits of regulation, if any, exceed the costs. The growth of large firms coincided with the growth of regulation; regulation is a prerequisite to large scale, so advocates of regulation claim to solve a problem that they have caused.  Before federal intervention, cartelization of industry repeatedly failed.  It did not succeed until the Sherman Antitrust Act and Theodore Roosevelt encouraged it.  The Sherman Antitrust Act encouraged the growth of large-scale firms by illegalizing collusion or cooperation among small firms.

Moreover, the threat that large government poses to private citizens' welfare is worse than large firms' extraction of monopoly rents.  Is a United States government that has expanded through imperialism, murdered Native Americans, enabled the enslavement of Blacks through the US Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act, murdered a million-and-a-half Vietnamese, exiled immigrants who disagreed with the capitalist system, and funded political correctness in universities to be trusted to make us safe from power companies?

Did the Jews gassed in Dachau feel grateful to the Nazi government for regulating power companies?

Firewall Needed: Google and the NSA

The Washington Post reports that Google and the National Security Agency are teaming up to identify the hackers who penetrated Google's China system. The article points out the need to balance privacy and security. That is a key libertarian problem that has become increasingly intricate with the advance of technology. Phone tapping posed issues that were unknown when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution, and now Internet technology poses ever more complex privacy problems. Here in the eastern Catskills, "hippies" will not get onto a computer because of fear of government. I'm not sure if this correlates with illegal behavior, but I know two people with good educations who will not get on any computer and never have. The article says that:

"collaboration is not easy, in part because private companies do not trust the government to keep their secrets and in part because of concerns that collaboration can lead to continuous government monitoring of private communications. Privacy advocates, concerned about a repeat of the NSA's warrantless interception of Americans' phone calls and e-mails after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, say information-sharing must be limited and closely overseen."

Another aspect of an arrangement between US spook agencies and information services is the potential for international tension. It is likely that agents of the communist government were in involved in the hacking. Might pressure from the NSA create tensions with China?

The article quotes Matthew Aid, author of "The Secret Sentry":

"I'm a little uncomfortable with Google cooperating this closely with the nation's largest intelligence agency, even if it's strictly for defensive purposes."

Given that the collaboration between Google and NSA is primarily one involving sharing of information about the hackers' techniques and code, it would seem that the collaboration maximizes freedom. But given that Google has a lot of potentially embarrassing information about a large swathe of the American public, it needs to have NSA-proof systems philosophies in place to ensure a firewall between its data and the potentially suppressive activities of the government.