The sword of transparency, turned inward

Reason reports that New York City's mayor has constructed and publicized a tax database that, in the telling of the headline, 'doxed wealthy New Yorkers' — that is, exposed private financial information about identifiable individuals as a matter of deliberate municipal policy. The lead characterizes it plainly: the mayor 'painted a target' on wealthy taxpayers.

I will begin where I always begin: not with whether the wealthy deserve scrutiny — they do, as does every actor in a republic — but with the mechanism. Who authorized this disclosure? By what legal instrument does a municipal executive compel the exposure of private financial particulars and then publish them to the general population? And, critically, what remedy does the targeted citizen possess?

The Bill of Rights, which I helped draft, was constructed precisely on the premise that government power is most dangerous not when it is loud and legislative but when it is quiet and administrative. The Fourth Amendment restrains unreasonable searches; the Fifth Amendment forbids the government from compelling a person to be a witness against himself. These are not protections for the guilty — they are the structural guarantees that keep power from becoming persecution. When an executive agency collects data under one legal authority and then deploys it as a political instrument under another, that is a species of the same danger, even if no single statute is broken.

I wrote in Federalist No. 51 that the great security against a gradual concentration of power in any department lies in giving each branch the means and the personal motive to resist encroachments by the others. That logic applies downward through the federal architecture to the states and to the municipalities. A mayor is an executive. The executive's legitimate power is to administer the law as written, not to construct instruments of public shaming directed at classes of citizens the executive has deemed politically useful to target. Inference only — I have not seen the database itself — but if Reason's characterization holds, this is the executive branch of a city operating as factional weapon, not as neutral administrator.

The faction question is not trivial. I argued in Federalist No. 10 that the greatest danger in a republic is a majority faction that uses legitimate democratic instruments to oppress a minority. Wealth is not a protected class in the constitutional sense, but the principle is portable: when a government official deliberately exposes private citizens to public hostility on the basis of their membership in an identifiable group, the government has ceased to be the neutral referee of the social compact and has become a combatant. That is true whether the targeted group is despised or admired.

The structural remedy here is not complicated. Legislatures — city council, state assembly — should define precisely what financial data a municipal executive may collect, retain, and publish, and for what purposes. Courts should stand ready to hear challenges from citizens who claim the disclosure exceeded lawful authority or caused concrete harm. Neither remedy requires us to sympathize with the wealthy; it requires only that we insist the government play by the rules it has written, and that those rules bind the powerful official as firmly as they bind the private citizen. A republic that protects only the popular deserves neither the name nor the longevity.