This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown. After thousands of episodes over nearly 18 years,

I've moved on from the Cato Daily podcast, but in the interim, I, along with some of you, have selected some favorites.

I hope they resonate with our current moment and continue to spark the desire to defend liberty.

Thank you for listening.

This is the Cato Daily podcast for Thursday, September 8th, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown. The attacks of

September 11, 2001, spurred a reshuffling of federal law enforcement. That's been for ill.

According to Cato Institute legal policy analyst David Ritgers, he argues the massive

Department of Homeland Security is duplicative, engages in jobs that should be left to states

in the private sector and stands in opposition to the demands of a free society.

Ritker's author of the forthcoming Cato paper abolish the Department of Homeland Security.

Why should people seriously consider that this

department that has amalgamated all of these different law enforcement tasks be eliminated wholesale?

Well, as a managerial technique, the amalgamation of disparate fields of responsibility within

government really doesn't make a lot of sense. And if this did make

sense, then long ago we would have consolidated all the responsibilities within the cabinet

under one official, the Secretary of Government, and been done with it. We haven't done so because

that doesn't make sense. And if this made sense in the private sector, there would be one

company, ACME or corporation or whatever you would call it, where, you know, everything would naturally run together.

And so the instinct to lump all of these responsibilities under one cabinet official, it really doesn't make sense as a manageable span of control, the number of subordinates

under any supervisor. It's a very difficult way to run government. And because of that,

we're now spending $3.4 billion to build a massive headquarters for parts of the DHS headquarters

apparatus within the national capital region, but it's actually

...