Duval Libertarian News Letter
Commentaries on our County Government from
The Libertarian Party of Duval County
Basic Facts
Florida Representative Peggy Gossett-Seidman (R) recently stated that, for over 15 years, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has collected $490 million from selling driver information to data brokers and others. She also filed the Motor Vehicle Operator Privacy Act on Nov. 16, 2025 to stop this practice. News4Jax. And this practice is happening in 23 states. Florida Politics.
The personal data sold includes names, addresses, birth dates, driver license numbers, driving histories, crash records, vehicle information, organ-donor status, physical descriptors, commercial driver’s license credentials, renewal history, restriction codes, emergency contact information and driver photographs.
The sales were done without Florida residents’ knowledge, consent, or an option to opt out; and were made to dozens of national and foreign-owned companies: for over $150 million before 2015, $77.9 million in 2017 and $263 million from 2021 to 2023. News4Jax.
She added that: “The State of Florida is not in the business of selling your personal information. Under my bill, it never will be again.” and “For years, this system operated without public awareness. Even high-ranking state officials were not fully informed”. News4Jax.
Our Opinion
What We Should Do About This Privacygate Scandal
First, we want to thank state representative Peggy Gossett-Seidman for unearthing this little-known abuse of bureaucratic power, and proposing legislation to end it.
Second, we want to condemn the rest of the legislature and the governor for being so busy promoting themselves to notice this atrocious bureaucratic abuse of power, especially, if they knew about it and did nothing.
We also ask for an investigation of the Department of Motor Vehicles to determine if it violated any laws. And even if no laws were broken, the governor should use his powers to fire the head of this department, as an administrative decision to send this message to the rest of the bureaucracy:
We will not tolerate policies that are designed just to increase a department’s revenues, such as police speed traps or delays returning asset forfeitures after someone accused of a crime is found not guilty.
And the ultimate irony of this is that the US government has extensive laws and regulations regarding the privacy and security of personal information held by private businesses, which you can read about here: Protecting Personal Information: A Guide for Business. But they do not apply to governments, at least not to state governments. This reflects the misguided attitude that: since governments exist to protect you, and they are not profit-seeking organizations, they can be trusted.
What Privacygate Tells Us About our Government
We also have lessons to learn from this case about how government works: its transparency, its motivations and the nature of “public service”.
Keeping track of most of what government is doing is impossible for just about everyone. It is simply too big. Even city governments are too complex to understand for almost everyone. Therefore, as our DMV case demonstrates, it is fairly easy for governments to keep abuses of power hidden.
While the ideal of a government employee is to be a “public servant”, the reality is that self interest is just as much alive in the government as in private businesses. The difference is that governments have a monopoly of power, while private businesses have to compete to survive and thrive (except when the government gives them protection from competition like restrictive licenses and taxes on imports of their product, or picks winners and losers by subsidizing some and overtaxing others, which are other abuses of power).
Business competition works because, to succeed in business one has to satisfy its customers with its quality and prices, and pay competitive wages to its employees. Consumers and workers don’t have to know the inner workings of the business to determine whether or not to buy or get a job at a private business. They just need to know that the product they are buying is the best for the price, or the job they are getting is the best pay and working conditions they can get. This contrasts with the much more difficult evaluation of the performance of a government by the voters.
What Libertarians Advocate
Libertarians advocate that governments should only do what only governments can do.
We do need a police force, prosecutors, judges and prisons to prevent real crimes against others using strict, but human punishment to deter them. But we don’t need laws against victimless “crimes”.
We do need armed forces to protect us from attacks from foreign nations, but not to intervene in other countries’ affairs, regardless of how much we dislike their form of government.
We do need for government to have laws to define and protect our civil liberties and property rights. But, not to set maximum rents on apartments and minimum wages, and design the features of our appliances.
We do need government to regulate the use of the “common property”, like lakes, ocean and air, because their individual property rights cannot be practically defined; and to prevent their overuse, because what is everyone’s property is nobody’s property.
All levels of government should sell their state-owned businesses, such as the post office, the passenger rail system, and the ownership of shares in corporations, plus city owned electric utilities and buses.
And no government should subsidize any private business or protected it from competition. The “job creating” and “economic development” arguments for this are wrong. Government subsidies just politicize businesses by distributing unearned privileges.
Limiting the government to what only government can do will also make it easier for voters to track what the remaining government is doing, and thus make more informed voting decisions.
This is not a comprehensive list of what libertarians advocate, only some examples.
To learn more about what we advocate, we recommend these publications: