Truth be told, this is a good thing. Democratic governments really ought not have ulterior motives kept hidden from their citizens. Chances are 99% of these 'secrets' are bad government CYA or worse. They will hand the press a handful of the millions of documents to justify hiding everything, ignoring the rest...

Looking for ISPs to censor, are you. Funny that most people don't know the Great Firewall is called Golden Shield over in China, and that part of the government's sales pitch is 'protecting children from harmful content'. You send us down that road, it's a road straight to hell. It never surprises me that Christ's crucifixion was arranged by the professionally holy. How about you mind your own business. Internet Explorer and almost every other browser have content control options. Sure, not all content is marked, but the feature is still there. If you can't be bothered to investigate it, maybe pay attention to what your own kids are doing on the Internet if it bothers you, and leave other parents and their children alone.

"The moral order that makes freedom possible"? Do you mean "leaving other people alone to trade and live as they please", in Christianity being "remove the log in your own eye before the speck in your brother's"? Because *that's* the moral order that makes freedom possible. Not the one you're preaching. As for spending taxpayer money to fund abortion overseas, I absolutely agree that that is wrong.

Regulation ought to be proportional in cost to implement to the amount of product being output. Anything else is a distortion on the market and will put people under. Government-*caused* "economies of scale" thanks to regulation such as this do nothing but bias towards large farms, which will keep getting larger as the regulation savings keep going up. This is not a healthy thing. Proper policy ought to, if anything biased, tilt the market towards perfect competition.

John... Not everyone in a market buys what they buy specifically by the price. The products are not entirely identical (the production method is different) and if someone cares about that difference, they are going to value it higher. "Better" in this case is a personal decision, as it is for any free choice... On a purely dollars-per-kg-meat perspective, the corn is subsidized. We're paying by taxes not at the grocery. You can't ignore that when making an economic argument. As for 'carbon footprint'... First, your argument seems to be that for the quantity of meat, the animals will die sooner and as such breathe less per kilogram output meat. Pardon me for not caring about carbon footprint, because second, there was far more CO2...

If the claim is 'people want this security to feel safe', why not open it up for competition. Have some flights that are TSA and some that are not ('at your own risk'). Then people who really desire the government 'protecting' them (security theater that it is) can have it, and those of us who feel it's accomplishing nothing can get on with our flights. I think we would soon see how few people (aside from companies selling scanner machines) really want this.

You'd do well to stop thinking of people as a homogeneous mass. The world tends to make more sense when you do.

The political fallout from this will far outweigh any money saved. Folks listen to NPR on the way home from work, so you're attacking something very personal. Raise the Social Security age by 10 years or something, that'll give you real savings. Going to have to in time anyway.

Yes, this is pretty much right. When you're running servers, you've got two ways to make them reliable. The first is, you buy extremely expensive hardware for your one server machine. It's expensive, because if you really need extremely good reliability you will be paying for it. The second method is, you have redundant machines. If you have two, you can get a 1% failure rate on each and what does that leave you with the failure of both? Something like 0.01%. Three and it's 0.0001%. You can very easily get something that essentially cannot go down from equipment failure, without extreme cost. Political folks, when confronted with 'it might break in unusual circumstances' seem to think the solution is 'make sure it doesn't break, and...