And yet... when you dig into the history you often find a justified reason why the redundancy exists.
For example, the United States has seven uniformed services with commissioned officers. Can you name them? Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, typically people can get immediately. Given a moment to think, most people also come up with the Coast Guard. But what are the other two?
The Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is the sixth. Which most people kind-of get and realize that's why the Surgeon General wears a vice-admiral's uniform (in fact he is a commissioned vice-admiral -- not of the Navy, of the Public Health Service). They have a commissioned corps because part of their job is being deployed -- often alongside combatant officer corps from other services -- into emergency situations. They were organized for that duty along military lines by the first Surgeon General.
How about the seventh? Oh, that's NOAA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You know, the people who do the weather forecasts. They have a commissioned officer corps, and the director is a rear-admiral (again, not of the Navy -- a rear-admiral of NOAA). Why do they have a commissioned corps? Because they've historically rendered assistance to the military in situations where land and coast surveys and weather information were necessary, and commissioning them gave them protection under the laws of war (otherwise, if captured, they could be executed as spies).
Similarly, why is it that certain financial crimes get you investigated by the Secret Service and not the FBI? The Secret Service protects the President, after all, and that has nothing to do with finance. But originally they were chartered for the narrow purpose of fighting counterfeiting, back when Congress was reluctant to authorize a general-purpose federal law-enforcement agency. Then, since they had a good intelligence network across the country as a result of the anti-counterfeiting mission, presidential protection got tacked onto their charter (at that time, Congress didn't want to proliferate federal enforcement agencies). Today, they investigate some types of frauds and other financial crimes because it still falls under their original anti-counterfeiting charter.
You can literally write books about this stuff if you dive into the history of it, and you'll often find that there were good, rational, justifiable reasons for why things were set up the way they were.
You say "and yet..." but it sounds like you're just elaborating on what the GP said. Was that a disagreement?
GP's point was that redundancy has been accumulated over the years. Of course there's usually a rational justifiable reason, but that doesn't mean it's still a valid one.
Really interesting stuff on the uniformed services.
Of course there's usually a rational justifiable reason, but that doesn't mean it's still a valid one.
And yet... consider the Secret Service thing. Congress was reluctant to concentrate federal law-enforcement power in one agency. And the history of the FBI shows that may have been the right idea.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Sometimes it's valid, sometimes it's not -- are we disagreeing or does "and yet..." mean something completely different than what I think it implies?
I was speaking in general terms. You gave two very specific (and interesting) examples; among all the examples you can give, plenty of them will "no longer be valid".
For example, the United States has seven uniformed services with commissioned officers. Can you name them? Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, typically people can get immediately. Given a moment to think, most people also come up with the Coast Guard. But what are the other two?
The Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is the sixth. Which most people kind-of get and realize that's why the Surgeon General wears a vice-admiral's uniform (in fact he is a commissioned vice-admiral -- not of the Navy, of the Public Health Service). They have a commissioned corps because part of their job is being deployed -- often alongside combatant officer corps from other services -- into emergency situations. They were organized for that duty along military lines by the first Surgeon General.
How about the seventh? Oh, that's NOAA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You know, the people who do the weather forecasts. They have a commissioned officer corps, and the director is a rear-admiral (again, not of the Navy -- a rear-admiral of NOAA). Why do they have a commissioned corps? Because they've historically rendered assistance to the military in situations where land and coast surveys and weather information were necessary, and commissioning them gave them protection under the laws of war (otherwise, if captured, they could be executed as spies).
Similarly, why is it that certain financial crimes get you investigated by the Secret Service and not the FBI? The Secret Service protects the President, after all, and that has nothing to do with finance. But originally they were chartered for the narrow purpose of fighting counterfeiting, back when Congress was reluctant to authorize a general-purpose federal law-enforcement agency. Then, since they had a good intelligence network across the country as a result of the anti-counterfeiting mission, presidential protection got tacked onto their charter (at that time, Congress didn't want to proliferate federal enforcement agencies). Today, they investigate some types of frauds and other financial crimes because it still falls under their original anti-counterfeiting charter.
You can literally write books about this stuff if you dive into the history of it, and you'll often find that there were good, rational, justifiable reasons for why things were set up the way they were.