MEGAN MCARDLE:

Perhaps I am too jaded by excess air travel, but most of our homeland security seems designed to

A) Increase the power of congressmen and agency heads or
B) Put on a show for the yokels

rather than

C) Make us safer

Homeland security is the conservative version of the national healthcare plans I keep reading. Sure, in theory this new agency is going to make us all safer. But the plans all seem to rely on the interest group politics, bureaucratic dysfunction, and congressional power games that have produced the immense problems in our current system somehow magically disappearing. Instead, the thing gets more expensive, and less efficient.

All I can say is I told you so.