FBI Edits Mission Statement: Removes Law Enforcement As 'Primary' Purpose

schwit1 writes with news that the FBI has altered their declared primary function from "law enforcement" to "national security." From the article: "Following the 9/11 attacks, the FBI picked up scores of new responsibilities related to terrorism and counterintelligence while maintaining a finite amount of resources. What's not in question is that government agencies tend to benefit in numerous ways when considered critical to national security as opposed to law enforcement. 'If you tie yourself to national security, you get funding and you get exemptions on disclosure cases,' said McClanahan. 'You get all the wonderful arguments about how if you don't get your way, buildings will blow up and the country will be less safe.'"

Comments

Re:The military did not destroy Rome ...

[iluvcapra]

The military industrial complex did not destroy Rome. It was the free bread and circuses and other freebies designed to buy the votes of the citizenry. This not only racked up the debt but it undermined the concept of citizenship.

OK, This is Mises's revisionism. Rome had corruption among the tribunes, but they also had praetorians killing emperors left and right; they had foederati and mercenaries defending the borders; they had a completely broken tax system which exempted most citizens from above-board taxation, which demanded a spoils-driven empire to merely sustain law and order. Rome also had a sclerotic civil administration that was never equal to the task of operating a vast continental empire, and lacked innovations even the Merovingians and Franks had, such as accounting of state appropriations.

We also have the multi-cultural development of the Roman state, it's long-term tendency towards centralization, it's failure to integrate foreign societies as it did in the Republican era. Gibbon's belief that the rise of Christianity depleted the state of its legitimacy and caused the elite to give up on civic improvement can also be studied with profit.

We also have the reorganization of the Roman state after the partition, and the Byzantine empire, which operated under approximately the same constraints as the Roman Empire, and would stage influence-buying sprees that made the Roman panem et circenses look like a church social, yet it lasted an extra thousand years.

It's also a point of argument wether or not the Roman imperial office actually fell, or merely just reorganized itself as the Catholic Church, which, again, used religion and the narrative of salvation as a replacement for panem.

The fact is that all states, or cultural orders, try to buy the consent of the masses; when they can, they do it with law and order, when they must, they do it with great feats of the state, military triumphs, evidence that whatever else may be wrong, we can beat the crap out of the Alemanni. If the Alemanni are no longer being defeated, worse, they're successfully sacking the city every couple years, the state tries to buy the people's obedience with "freebees." We moderns demand our government send men to the moon, and merely steal the oil of the barbarians and not slaughter them, so we might call that progress.

Re:Put a fork in it, it's done.

[ShanghaiBill]

The mammoth TARP bailout of big banks was a one one of the most massive interventions in the economy ever and it was Republican lead.

Let's look at the vote:
For TARP: 172 Democrats, 91 Republicans
Against: 63 Democrats, 108 Republicans