Homeland Security Pork

Politicians Fight For Homeland Security Pork

The Rising Issue of Homeland Insecurity

By Roy D. Follendore III

January 27, 2003

Well we Americans sure have done a great deal to protect our security so far here in the homeland. We have trashed our existing organizations that have successfully protected us in the past, and because of that dropped the R&D budgets for new technologies that might protect us. Now we have the Democrats fighting over the pork. We can be assured that lots of deals were cut that made sure that the money for Homeland Security went the "right direction." That is part of the capital hill mentality. Even disasters have their advantages for politicians. These people like to play politics like the stock market. The time to get the goods is when the prices are low. No wonder Homeland Security was the only thing that the Democrats and the Republicans can agree upon. That is funny since they could not even agree on a Federal budget.

Maybe the "first responders" in backwater counties need billions of dollars worth of chemical, biological and nuclear warfare survival equipment. But the truth is that they probably need most of it about as much as all of the other junk that the Federal Government has shown fit to dump on them. (Oh maybe a few of them might need some of it, particularly since so much radioactive, chemical and biological residual pollution still exists from the cold war and from EPA dumps that are ignored since they have been taken off the Internet "to prevent terrorism." Let us also not forget about all of those old corroding Nuclear Power plants that will inevitably fail.) But the fact is that America long ago dismantled its Civil Defense program because of the same simple and less exciting reasons this one will probably be dismantled. The American budget just cannot afford to pay for a bunch of useless junk that will be sitting around everywhere rotting.

Sure it is possible that the United States might be hit by more terrorism at sometime in the future. It is also possible that the entire human race might be wiped out by a plague that is created though DNA manipulation of our food sources. Maybe even certain people should have inoculations. The point is that there are so many quite credible doomsday scenarios that come straight from Hollywood that we can not afford to cover every possible contingency at all times. It is doubtful that we should, even if we could because if we did the scale of it would mean that our country would be in the business of doing nothing but that. That does not mean that we should do nothing.

I am also not saying that it is foolish to produce medicines for a potential demand. I am not saying that knowledge and awareness and even equipment is not an important thing to be prepared to deliver on demand. In fact, we can economize by developing our national infrastructure so that they are able to rapidly deliver disaster services on demand. Factories to deliver supplies and organizations of teachers might teach teachers can be prepared for emergencies and disasters. But to put this great nation of the United States on constant war footing, distribute resources in every nook and cranny and then sustain that over decades is beyond absurd, it is irrational. This form of irrational thinking about mobilization seems to be the American version of the old Mao revolution in China and it has been popular since 911. There has been too much grand heroic centralized planning for decentralized assets without understanding their needs and far too little rational economic rational thinking-taking place.

While the politicians fight for leveraging pork for their states, someone needs to be thinking about the economics and sustainability of National Security. We need to think about what is good for America first. The Democrats are trying to make an economic issue out of the Office of Homeland Security. We probably should not have ever created such a monstrosity in the first place, but for better or worse we now do. Now what we need to be paying attention to is the fact that this creature will be far more efficient at burning billions more of taxpayers money for useless state programs and potentially dangerous solutions to problems that really don't exist. Otherwise the Office of Homeland Security will become the Office of Homeland Insecurity. You can be certain that we will be hearing that term from now on.

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