U.S. Senators Sam Brownback (pictured below), R-KS, and Pat Roberts, R-KS, applauded Senate passage of the Conference Report to the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill. The bill includes $32 million of funding for the new National Bio-Agriculture Facility to be relocated in Manhattan, Kansas. The Conference Committee report is the final bill that was negotiated to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions of the legislation. The House has already passed the conference report and the bill now heads to the president to be signed into law.
 "The passage of this final bill is a huge step in relocating NBAF to Kansas and provides $27 million for design and planning and $5 million to begin construction of the lab," stated Brownback. "There is no better place for NBAF than in Kansas, which is already the center of the world's best animal health research, and this lab is vitally important to protecting our nation's food supply." Senator Roberts said, "The Congress has made a significant investment to the new NBAF in Kansas. I want to thank Senator Brownback for his hard work in Committee and look forward to working with the State and the Department of Homeland Security as the $32 million in design and construction funding is spent."
Brownback is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the subcommittee on Homeland Security, and was a part of the conference committee negotiations. Roberts is the honorary chair of the NBAF Task Force and spearheaded the effort, beginning in 2005, to bring NBAF to Kansas. The aging NBAF lab on Plum Island, N.Y., is being phased out and moved to Manhattan, Kansas. The NBAF lab, sometimes referred to as the CDC for animal science, will ensure public health and the safety and security of our national food supply. It will provide integrated research, response, and diagnostic capabilities to protect animal and public health. It is estimated that over a 20-year period, NBAF will have a $3.5 billion impact on the Kansas economy. The proposed site is a $451 million, 500,000- square-foot building and will create as many as 500 high-paying, scientific federal jobs in Kansas and will bring additional jobs in research partnerships to the state. - High Plains Publishers
Dominant Social Theme: The system comforts with its seeming inevitability?
Free-Market Analysis: The heartland of the United States was once the bastion of free-market common sense in an increasingly socialized world. It probably remains so, but its leadership is moving in another direction. This little squib of an article is a perfect example of how larger insanities - well, from our point of view, anyway - trickle down and become accepted dominant social themes.
How so? The article quotes two standup Congressmen as lauding US Homeland Security as well as the concept of government investment in a spanking new NBAF lab, which will "ensure public health and the safety and security of our national food supply." The article also states that the laboratory will create as many as 500 high-paying, scientific, federal jobs in Kansas.
Let's take the smaller points first. Government doesn't create jobs, people do, individually through human action. How many jobs were actually LOST from the taxation and monetary stimulation utilized to provide the funds for this new lab? For those not sure where we are coming from with this question, take a quick read of Henry Hazlitt's, "Economics in One Lesson." Second, government does not and cannot protect the public as regards "animal and public health." Government is essentially a reactive enterprise. The bureaucracy reacts mostly to salvage and perpetuate its employment and pension benefits. Finally, there is apparently no reason for the creation and continued expansion of Homeland Security into every nook and cranny of America's putative free-market system. Let's examine this significant issue a bit more closely.
The Congressmen mentioned in this article apparently have a good deal of interaction with Homeland Security. This sprawling, increasingly dangerous organization is treated with extraordinary courtesy and polity. Yet according to the lead litigator for the 9/11 Commission Report - that was used to justify the creation and expansion of Homeland Security - chances are most likely the entire political and military establishment lied about 9/11 and its aftermath. With the 9/11 report thoroughly discredited, one would believe that there would be a clamor, at least in the heartland, for a renewed investigation into 9/11 and the massive intelligence bureaucracy that it spawned (Homeland Security).
At the very least, Homeland Security itself, which has no place in a constitutional republic, and the unlimited wiretapping that the FBI and other agencies are now pursuing, should come under increased scrutiny. We believe, in fact, a day of reckoning is coming, but not yet. A few more high profile cases, a few more instances of "whistleblowers" coming forward as they have regarding routine CIA torture, and this last political rotten borough will begin to feel the sanitizing effects of sunshine.
Something that is not mentioned in the above article, but that the Daily Bell routinely writes about, is the apparent insanity of the West's global economy, driven by an increasingly unaccountable central banking establishment. There is no justification for central banking, which is essentially a practice of fixing the price and supply of money - an impossibility if one believes in free-market economics, the law of supply and demand, marginal utility, etc.
The United States' new, KGB-like Homeland Security Agency is erected on a lie, or a series of lies, according to the lead litigator of the 9/11 Commission who believes that the entire socio-political establishment of the US did not tell the truth about 9/11 and its aftermath. The US economy is central-banking based, and we wonder how many people (outside those directly benefiting) can justify endless human-intervention in the basic money-stuff of the national - and international - economy. Finally, the most basic economic tenets of the market are routinely violated by US politicians and certain economists maintaining that the government can "protect" citizens from a variety of ills when it patently cannot - or stating with straight faces that government creates jobs.
So we ask you, dear reader, is the United States clinically insane? Only a century ago, we could not really have asked this question. The trends were not nearly so well developed yet. But with the erection of yet another arm of its military-industrial complex based on an extremely dubious rationale, and with its economic policies based on price-fixing and monetary manipulation, we wonder if the US has reached the tipping point.
Conclusion: Yes, dear reader, we wonder if the US sociopolitical and monetary elite has gone off the charts. We wonder if, were this group evaluated en masse, whether the verdict would be clinical insanity. A state of affairs that would exist in our opinion when actions taken and the solutions implemented on a personal and professional level have little or nothing to do with tackling actual ills. The solutions bear little relationship to the problems purportedly being solved but which in fact tend to exacerbate them. You could actually ask this about the entire Western leadership, including those at the head of the increasingly enlarging EU. Are we wrong to wonder?
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