THANK GOD efforts to repeal the inheritance tax failed. There is no group in American society as left wing as the inheritors of great wealth. If we had repealed the death tax, in a few years, faster than you could say MacArthur Foundation, the country would have been rife with neurotic trustefarians setting up left-wing foundations to support the work of grant-greedy academic revolutionaries.
The money will be far less harmfully spent by the federal government than by the foundations these patricidal scions would have established. With a high inheritance tax in place, you get a few extra bucks to pump into the entitlement programs before they go kablooey, and you get a massive improvement in American society. Instead of having a huge inheritor class, the product of the recent boom, you will have a generation of people who are affluent but still have to work for a living.
I cannot imagine why the Republican party was so keen on creating a new leisure class.
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LAST WEEK, as you know, the president announced a Worthwhile Bureaucratic Restructuring, the initiative to create a Homeland Security cabinet department. This week Congress is looking into it.
Much of the concern revolves around this central puzzle: You’ve got the FBI, which is now being reformed so that preventing terror is its primary mission. And you’ve got this new agency, which will have preventing terror as its primary mission. So the question is, do you take the bureau that is supposed to prevent terror and put it inside the agency that is supposed to prevent terror?
This doesn’t seem like a tough question. And yet the White House rejected the idea. According to the Washington Post, various interested parties are trying furiously to protect their turf by making the case that the FBI should not be folded into the homeland security agency. All their arguments are lame.
One source says that you need to keep the agency in the Justice Department where they respect the rule of law, because it is easy for the FBI to trespass beyond the law. Does anybody really believe the federal workers not affiliated with the Justice Department are less law-abiding than those who are affiliated with Justice?
Another person says that since many terrorist organizations commit credit card fraud, it makes sense to keep the anti-terror groups in the same bureaucracy as the anti-credit card fraud prosecutors.
Are they making these arguments with a straight face?
It turns out that Chris Dodd, of all people, is correct. It’s time to ask fundamental questions about the CIA, the FBI, and the other intelligence and security agencies. It’s time to have an independent commission think broadly on these issues, and ask questions, the sort of questions Americans asked at the start of the Cold War. For example, why are the people who fight al Qaeda abroad separated from the people who fight al Qaeda at home? Why are folks who fight bookies in the same agency as the folks who fight people intent on blowing up buildings?
The Bush administration’s effort to short-circuit these fundamental considerations by sticking the Coast Guard in the same agency as Livermore labs and FEMA is not going to work.
David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
