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Comment by dj2stein9 | Hacker News Reader

This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. Everyone knew that once Homeland Security was created it would become a sprawling, pervasive, and never-ending drain on the country. Eliminating it now is probably out of the question because it would be substantially more costly (politically and economically) than keeping it running.

Basically they've taken the script of the TV series "24" and used it to turn the entire government into a giant anti-terrorism organization that cannot locate or defend the country against any terrorists. But year after year the programs are always "underfunded" and so the bureaucracy grows and gets worse at doing its job... It's a perfect storm of stupidity and ignorance that has no benefits other than keeping the system going for no reason whatsoever.

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this is completely of topic, i know. But could not not think about Obamacare when reading about "This is what bureaucracies do, they grow, more complex, more political, more expensive, and exponentially harder to dismantle. " ... I would also add to that: undemocratic.

Yes, conflate healthcare policy (that in many ways is fundamentally different) with Homeland Security. I apologize for my sarcasm, but this just seems like knee jerk partisanship.

In addition, we are not a democracy (per se), but a constitutional republic, and as such, our elected representatives decide public policy. In the case of Obamacare, Democrats had been overwhelmingly elected the prior year (and Obama ran with healthcare reform as a campaign pledge). So, I don't quite see how it is "undemocratic" either.

Don't jump to conclusion, both side of the establishment have been contributing to bloated bureaucracies, Obamacare is just one of the latest (and the one I last read of). My undemocatric comment was around bureaucracies in general, not obamacare specifically.

I think the analogy is perfectly valid. Regardless of the goals of a policy, its implementation via bureaucracy can still be so hopelessly complicated that it's a net drain on society.

It reminds me of a quote I once heard, possibly by Ron Paul (though I am not sure), that went along the lines of "Politicians mention 'tax reform' all the time. But unless they're talking about simplifying the tax code, they're not talking about tax reform."

The DHS and Obamacare both tacked on additional rules to an already overcomplicated and opaque set of systems, rather than streamline the underlying systems and their interactions. Our political process makes adding bureaucratic complexity easier than removing it. For under-regulated areas (like anti-trust laws in the early 20th century), this can solve problems. But otherwise it's more likely to make the underlying problems worse.

Obamacare and DHS removed plenty of regulations streamlining many things. What people really complain about is regulating new things not the overall complexity.

Why stop at Obamacare? It's much, much smaller than Medicare, Social Security, the US armed forces, DHS (+ all the related bureaus), the Federal Reserve, IRS, US Treasury... essentially the entire US government is a collection of dysfunctional bureaucracies that extract wealth from citizens in the form of taxes, give it back to corporations in the form of subsidies and tax refunds, and give citizens next to nothing in return.

You're obviously generalizing quite a bit. When you say "Homeland Security" do you mean ALL of these components: http://www.dhs.gov/department-components

That's quite a lot to "eliminate". Granted there seems to be quite some overlap there. Where and what programs would we want to specifically cut? Doesn't congress appropriate a budget for DHS? They should be able to make changes long term, right?

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