Worthless Constitution?

NSA director to get a public grilling in the Senate ... General Keith Alexander, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, testifies before the House Armed Services Committee on September 23, 2010 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. ... As pressure mounts for the intelligence community to curb its surveillance activities or at least make them more transparent, a key National Security Agency official will testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. Army Gen. Keith Alexander, National Security Agency director and head of U.S. Cyber Command, will testify before the full committee in a previously-scheduled session, marking the first time an NSA official will answer to Congress in public since news broke that the agency is collecting all of Verizon's U.S. phone records, as well as internet content from non-U.S. internet users abroad. – CBS

Dominant Social Theme: The US Congress will get to the bottom of these problems.

Free-Market Analysis: Nope. The US Congress is a political institution and in the modern era, political institutions are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

In fact, Western regulatory democracy is only about 400 years old, and for most of the past millennia, the idea that "government" could safeguard the freedoms of the average individual would have been looked on as a most strange perception, indeed.

Today, Congress is expected to "grill" the head of the NSA – see article excerpt above – as if those in Congress were not part of the same system that produced the NSA and its activities to begin with.

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