The Costs of Overreaction

Fareed Zakaria on something I've carped about a lot on Xmastime, the costs of our overreacting to 9/11:

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

There's a laughable irony to me that the very crowd demanding we overreact our way into exploding the size of the government in the name of a constant police state are the same people seemingly always outraged that the gub'ment is so large and poking around in their lives.