"A man has a right to use a saw, an axe, a plane, separately; may he not combine their uses on the same piece of wood? He has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject? Such a law, instead of enlarging our conveniences, as was intended, would most fearfully abridge them, and crowd us by monopolies out of the use of the things we have."

- Letter to Oliver Evans, (16 January 1814); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1905) Vol. 13, p. 66.

My favorite analogy for US security policy during the past two decades is a huge allergic reaction. It seems quite likely that allergies are caused by the immune system lacking antagonists and instead latching onto factors that are not real threats [1]. Similarly, the early '90s saw serious reductions in objective threats that US security was organized to deal with, internal (a sustained decline in crime [2]) and external (the disappearance of a second superpower). The resulting reaction is... what else if not allergic? Police is more militarized than ever and drives tanks into the living rooms of nonviolent offenders. The military's budget is unprecedentedly large and it hunts down shepherds in the Afghan hills at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per kill. Any claim that such threats are comparable with those that were adequately met in the '80s (crack epidemic, nuclear-tipped ICBMs etc.) is nothing short of risible. Yet the response is, if anything, even more aggressive than it was back then.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crim...