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THE CENSUS GOES TOO FAR
All Americans have a responsibility to fill out the headcount portion of the census, but the remaining questions may be an unconstitutional infringement on civil liberties.
-- 4/19/2010

According to Article I, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution, a census must be conducted by the House of Representatives every 10 years to determine the country’s head count. That head count then determines how many representatives each state will have in Congress.

There have been television ads telling us that we have to complete our census forms (which include questions that have nothing to do with the simple headcount proscribed in the Constitution) in order to, among other things, get federal funding for our communities.

This is just another example of the federal government taking a clause out of the Constitution and misshaping it into something much more intrusive than originally intended. In this case, the census is being used to allocate welfare. Where in the Constitution is the federal government empowered to take money from the citizenry and distribute it to local communities?

The deception in this process is that the census determines which communites receive government money, and that this money can be used to create jobs building schools, hospitals, and the like. The implication is that this government money will bring prosperity to communities.

But the reality is that this is merely a redistribution of taxpayer money, which cannot create prosperity. A sad byproduct of this reality is that it only encourages politicians to push harder for the pork barrel projects that keep them in office while cleverly avoiding the fact that these projects are funded with your money. And your money is almost always more useful when invested in private enterprise rather than tax collection coffers. 

Especially offensive are the questions on the census forms regarding race. There is nothing in the Constitution that permits the federal government to count people based on race, gender, or any other classification. If government plans to distribute tax money to communities based on the head count, why does it need to know your race? Because funds can be better allocated for failed affirmative action programs which are implicitly racist and unequal. 

Americans should not have to answer these types of questions from their government, no matter how harmless they may seem. The purpose of the census is to count heads. It is important to complete the census form, but Americans should be able to simply give the government a head count. Nothing more.