Take, for example, the new declaration from the Clinton administration that AIDS is a threat to national security. They won't be getting educated or keeping jobs or participating in governance and society. They'll be too busy ailing and dying to go to school. They'll have to put all of their time and energy into trying to stay alive rather than going to work. They'll become poorer parents and spouses and sons and daughters because, when your life is being snatched away by a cruel disease, you don't make the parents' conferences or the soccer matches, Valentine's Day means little and those fun little chess games with Dad are lost to the sad long ago.
Societies fall apart, families fall apart, lives fall apart.
It becomes vulnerable to takeover and tyranny. Thus is the world endangered. Maybe we can afford to snicker at the beer tax proposal, chalking it off to another instance of big government having too much time on its hands. But AIDS as a national security issue should give us pause. But not too much.