Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants," wrote Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. In the original and primary sense of lacks or needs, wants tend to structure our vision of government's responsibilities. The quest for security - whether economic, physical, psychological, or military - brings a sense of urgency to politics and is one of the enduring sources of passion in policy controversies. Need is probably the most fundamental political claim. Even toddlers know that need carries more weight than desire or deservingness. They learn early to counter a rejected request by pleading, "I need it." To claim need is to claim that one should be given the resources or help because they are essential. Of course, this raises the question "essential for what?" In conflicts over security, the central issues are what kind of security government should attempt to provide; what kinds of needs it should attempt to meet; and how the burdens of making security a collective responsibility should be distributed.Just as most people are all for equity and efficiency in the abstract, most people believe that society should help individuals and families when they are in dire need. But beneath this consensus is a turbulent and intense conflict over how to distinguish need from mere desire, and how to preserve a work - or - merit based system of economic distribution in the face of distribution according to need. Defining need for purposes of public programs become much an exercise like defining equity and efficiency. People try to portray their needs as being objective, and policymakers seek to portray their program criteria as objective, in order to put programs beyond political dispute. As with equity and efficiency, there are certain recurring strategies of argument that can be used to expand or contract a needs claim.In defense policy, relative need is far more important than absolute. Our sense of national security (and hence our need for weapons) depends entirely on comparison with the countries we perceive as enemies. And here Keynes is probably right: The need for weapons can only be satisfied by feeling superior to "them." Thus, it doesn't matter how many people our warheads can kill or how many cities they can destroy. What matters is what retaliatory capacity we have left after an attack by the other side, or whether our capacity to sustain an offense is greater than their capacity to destroy it. The paradox of nuclear weapons is that the more security we gain in terms of absolute capability (i.e., kill potential), the more insecure we make ourselves with respect to the consequences of nuclear explosions. We gain superiority only by producing weapons we ourselves are terrified to use.
Twenty-three D," he said, as a boarding-pass spooled from a different slot. He pulled her passport out and handed it to her, along with her ticket and the boarding pass. "Gate fifty-two, blue concourse. Checking anything?""No.""Passengers who've cleared security may be subject to noninvasive DNA sampling," he said, the words all run together because he was only saying it because it was the law that he had to.She put her passport and ticket away in the special pocket inside her parka. She kept the boarding pass in her hand. She went looking for the blue concourse. She had to go downstairs to find it, and take one of those trains that was like an elevator that ran sideways. Half an hour later she was through security, looking at the seals they'd put on the zippers of her carry-on. They looked like rings of rubbery red candy. She hadn't expected them to do that; she'd thought she could find a pay-station in the departure lounge, link up, and give the club an update. They never sealed her carry-on when she went to Vancouver to stay with her uncle, but that wasn't really international, not since the Agreement.She was riding a rubber sidewalk toward Gate 52 when she saw the blue light flashing, up ahead. Soldiers there, and a little barricade. The soldiers were lining people up as they came off the sidewalk. They wore fatigues and didn't seem much older than the guys at her last school."Shit," she heard the woman in front of her say, a big-haired blond with obvious extensions woven in.