Brother Brown (the commenter, not the Senator elect) raises a very interesting point by juxtaposing these two concepts. In the mind of this Conservative, they are very different.
America is the government only to the extent that it is externally facing; I like to think of the Federal government as a standards bearer in general, but primarily there to handle foreign affairs. State Department, War Department, CIA. We call it 'Defense' but who are we kidding? Now the current DoD does have a split personality and that is proper. If it were up to me, I'd handle it as Barnett recommends. Have a War Department and call it that, and then have a Defense Department that does what we do so well, and are doing now in Haiti. I'd call it Global Defense or Global Services.
I hate Homeland Security. I never liked the name, and its constitution never made sense to me. I think half of it is a boondoggle. I'd resurrect the old Civil Defense, which while eerie, had people's respect. I don't like the idea of centralizing authority for first responders. I don't know how much of that is done, but I think it was demonstrated beyond a doubt at Katrina that the Regular Army and National Guard are really the only competently run organizations to handle domestic emergencies of any scale. Let the rest of the first responders get good at their regional specialties and self-organize. They can build their own Facebook and have their own radio spectrum. Give them pointers from Global Services, and that's all you need. Dismantle Homeland Security, expand and split up the Secret Service and share that tech. BTW, the aim of an expanded and distributed Secret Service is specifically for domestic surveillance.
Now the rest of the inward facing Federal agencies fall into two categories. Infrastructure and Welfare. Both are concerned with the standards of living of the American people. They are fundamentally maintenance organizations but only the first should have any responsibility for gradually improving the over all quality of its aegis. Instead they should keep abreast and follow the leads of advances made in the private sector and then, within strict budgetary limits, establish safety nets through which America must not fall.
Capacity in Reserve
Infrastructure and Welfare may very well be the majority business of the Federal government. I would rather have them at that than at War and Civil Defense. But the most important thing about the Federal infrastructure should be its latent capacity and the implications of exercising it. This capacity should be inherent to the needs of the people of the nation, and not a permanent structural aspect of the government itself. In other words, this is capacity that should be held in reserve and responsively spun up in response to the needs - driven by an expressed desire of the people to meet the need, not as an ideological test of the structure of the federal government itself.
So ask. When do we go to war? What are the specific conditions under which America commits to doing that thing to our utmost ability? We want to reserve the capacity to fight a two ocean war, for example. And we hold that ability in reserve. We keep a flexible structure to handle that eventuality but we only give a go to those contingencies when the situation clearly calls for it, not because we have a continual budget to and 'thats just what we do'. If it were that, how could anybody consider us to be anything but a warlike people? The same thing applies for Welfare. When do we go to welfare. What are the conditions under which America commits to doing that thing to our utmost ability. We want to reserve the capacity to hold unemployment to a maximum of 10%, for example. And we hold that ability in reserve. We keep a flexible structure to handle that eventuality but we only give a go to those contingencies when the situation clearly calls for it, not because we have a continual budget to and 'thats just what we do'. If it were that, how could anybody consider us to be anything but a welfare people?
To adopt such a strategy of capacity in reserve, we can think of these departments as batteries. We charge them as needed to their capacity and we maintain a low charge to keep them full. And so our taxation would be variable like the voltage needed. We maintain readiness, and readiness has a fixed price.
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To be anti-American is to suggest that the value of the people is expressed in their commitment to the government. To be anti-Government is to suggest that the value of the government is expressed in its commitment to the people. The former says without the government, the people are nothing and the people only gain value by adherence to the proper plan. The latter says without the people, the government is nothing and only gains value by adhering to the people.
Government always depends on the money of the people to function, so is it blood money or charity? Neither extreme of course. Since we are all always citizens, we don't really have a choice to withdraw completely. But the structure of the system of taxation, the laws about it are constituted so that it is our right to avoid, but not to evade taxation. The law recognizes human nature to not want to give up their money.
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It seems to me that even with a liberal democratic socialist in the European mold .. excuse me, social democrat in the White House, we are not currently likely to spend, at the end of this debacle, more than 40% in the top tax bracket. On principle I believe that for the privilege of living in America, that figure should never top 33%. Nobody needs government that much, and nobody should need that much government. I happen to think that Progressive taxation has gotten out of hand so that we are much closer to the blood money end of the spectrum. But I also know that the best and the brightest and the richest (c.f. Goldman Sachs quarterly results yesterday) will always be clever enough to outwit and outmaneuver the bureaucrats in peacetime. So it's actually the upper middle that's getting crushed these days. And our politics has become a contest of wills over what's in and what's out of government, not the proper functioning of that government in response to the needs of the people. There is no fundamental agreement on how big Infrastructure, Welfare, War, Civil Defense, State and Intel should be. We only seem to have confidence in the Judiciary, but yet we know that's becoming more politicized.
All of this is because, in my view, we have had so many social revolutions in the 20th Century. We haven't settled down to agree on what is properly American. It seems to me that the prudent thing is to reduce the size and scope of all that we do for all that we are until we can agree on who we are.
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