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A Billion Dollars of Federally Funded Paranoia

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When it comes to mindless excess in the war on terror, it is difficult to compete with the 70+ fusion centers bankrolled by the Department of Homeland Security. They began to be set up around the nation shortly after 9/11 as federal-state-local partnerships to better track terrorist threats. But the centers have been a world-class boondoggle from the start. Fusion centers have sent the federally funded roundup of data on Americans’ private lives into overdrive. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted in 2012, “Until 9/11, police departments had limited authority to gather information on innocent activity, such as what people say in their houses of worship or at political meetings. Police could only examine this type of First Amendment-protected activity if there was a direct link to a suspected crime. But the attacks of 9/11 led law enforcement to turn this rule on its head.” Fusion centers do a far better job of stoking paranoia than of catching terrorists. Various ...

Presidential Inaugurations and the Politics of Stealing Apples

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According to the Nielsen ratings, over 30.6 million people watched Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on television on January 20, 2017. The newly sworn in president soon was in a battle with the mainstream media about whether this was larger or smaller than the numbers who watched Barack Obama’s swearing in, in 2009. But whether the number of viewers was larger or smaller in 2009 versus 2017, it is nonetheless the case that 30.6 million is a lot of people. It is equal to almost the combined populations of the Czech Republic, Greece and Sweden. It is also nearly half the entire population of France, alone. However, since the total population of the United States at the end of 2016 is estimated to have been around 325 million people, that means only about 9.5 percent of the U.S. population watched the 45th president take his oath of office. Or another way of saying this: 90.5 percent of Americans found something better to ...

Adam Smith’s Moral Path through Quagmire

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Adam Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments offers a path through a dangerous social quagmire. Namely, the law increasingly demands that peaceful acts conform to a specific state-approved morality. The process turns morality into a matter of state and law rather than one of individual conscience. The politically correct justify mandatory morality in the name of social justice or a paternalism by which the elite know what is better for people than the people do themselves. For example, in signing the recent minimum-wage law in California, Gov. Jerry Brown stated, “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense” but “ and socially and politically, they make every sense.” By this, Brown meant the law made moral sense to him and to his ideological associates, who were willing to impose it upon anyone who disagreed. The religious Right justify mandatory morality in the name of God or decency, especially in matters of sex. For example, an April 2016 article in Mother Jones ...