Obama administration seeks $30M for CDC's Ebola efforts

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/05/obama-administration-seeks-30m-for-cdc-ebola-efforts/

The White House is requesting $30 million in the form of an appropriation bill to help control and prevent the spread of the Ebola disease in Africa. Also included in this bill is the hope for increased flexibility in the Homeland Security Department to deal with the issue of Central American children arriving in the states as immigrants. Obama's request for $3.7 million in July was not passed and now the issue over immigration has been delayed until after November elections. The bill included a few other requests for the White House budget, but for now I just want to focus on the first two.

The money requested for the issues of Ebola and immigration both have to do with controlling what we let into our borders. Obviously helping to control Ebola will mean the disease will be less likely to spread to the United States in an outbreak. We are not really concerned with getting rid of the disease as much as we are concerned with keeping ourselves safe. Protection is the major role of government (according to philosopher John Locke), but protection extends beyond war. Nowadays we expect the government to protect us from everything from the spread of disease to discrimination and bullying. I think the trend towards a stronger national government over the past centuries has directly correlated with the trend towards individual protection from more things. Essentially the issue over immigration is about protecting our borders, the issues over welfare spending is about protecting people from poverty and hunger, and the issue of ISIS is about protecting our country and the western way of life from terrorist organizations. When the United States became an international power, we extended protection to everyone else in the world from what we saw as bad (i.e. communism). All of that is oversimplification of the issues, but in the end we seek from protection from our government and so we expect them to provide that protection, from whatever is a threat at the time. As time goes on there seems to be more and more threats (small and large) to our overall and personal protection. I know I kind of diverged from the article, but I wanted to point out this connection to class.

Unit 1