[Newspoetry] fear and madness in loathing the times

[DL Emerick]

U.S. to Spend Billions More to Alter Security Systems
By ERIC LIPTON
After spending more than $4.5 billion, the federal government has concluded that much of the antiterrorism equipment is ineffective.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/national/08screen.html?th&emc=th

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The Republicans have never met a national security spending program that they could reject.  They don't know just how to say NO to national security spending.  The knee-jerking (goose-stepping) conservatives are far worse than the most mindless of the liberal democrats -- because their security spending never has the potential of helping any other human being... a fact quite contrary to all of the possible liberal excesses (there was always a chance someone might actually be helped, by the last marginal dollar spent)...

Not only does every dollar spent on security issues have a declining marginal utility (within any economy of scale), but also, every dollar spent is also negative, in the utility it purchases.  Ie, the bucket curve gets deeper and deeper -- its min-max solution is not to spend anything at all on national security issues.  The slippery slope is that one bad dollar spent invites a plethora of additional dollars to be spent, to rationalize, as it were, the host of badness by surrounding it by equal badness, in a uniform horizon of bleakness, an utter desolation, a desecration of the very meaning of economy.

And, as a rsult of this madness of national policy, is it any wonder that the people think of themselves as living in bad times, when the leaders they have selected, out of fear, are as bad as the ones that they (also) feared would be there?