Katrina and Hillary
Why is it that even well-intentioned government is so purely incompetent?
 

September 15 2005
Counterbias.com
by Ted Baiamonte
R E P U B L I C A N   V I E W
 

Speaking for the freedom loving Republican, it was Thomas Jefferson who said, "the government which governs best, governs least," before Bill O'Reilly, after Katrina and in his less artful way said, "the government is never going to help you." And, speaking for the government loving Federalists, Hillary Clinton said to Charles Gibson, "this is a time for massive public works spending." Of course she did not mention in her braindead, numbingly liberal Democratic way, that this then was also a time for massive new taxes that would massively hamstring the economy.

Katrina did indeed highlight a massive failure of government, but to Republicans this is more or less what you'd expect from government, even a government in which they have a razor thin majority. For Hillary and the Democrats the massive failure is a yet another excuse to make the government bigger and more powerful, and, in theory, better. To Republicans this is like trying making a car bigger to get better gas mileage. After all, four years after 9/11 the government Homeland Security bureaucracy is 100 times bigger than ever, and chock full of wonderful, caring, sensitive bureaucrats too; yet it was perfectly paralyzed by Katrina. Do we need to get rid of it or do we need to have Democrats manage an even bigger version of it? Hillary's standard Democratic answer seems preposterous given that it has just been tried here and now, and incidentally by every country on earth prior to Jefferson, who with the opposite theory, managed to create the greatest country on earth with, if you can believe it, the greatest freedom from bureaucracy on earth.

So why is it that even well intentioned government is so purely incompetent? Why can a businessman make a supercomputer, plasma TV, or PET scan machine from scratch, while a government bureaucrat can't drop food and water from a plane on starving people? It's simple, really: the super computer that exists today was actually created by thousands of people all over the world competing with each other over hundreds of years to gradually develop the technologies used in the supercomputer that exists today. A bureaucrat never had to compete with anybody, anywhere on earth, at any time in order to earn a living by being competent (say, at dropping food and water on starving people). Moreover, he never even had to practice doing it, not once. When the time came to do his job, he was no more qualified to do it than a kindergarten teacher would be to make a jet engine.

So what is the solution? Local government is inherently less bureaucratic and more accountable to the people it serves than the Federal government. The Feds can't have a specific disaster plan for every town in America, nor can they practice it. What they can do is order every town to have a plan and to practice it as if it were important to plan for a disaster. The New Orleans Mayor was screaming and yelling at the Feds as if his city was their responsibility because, unbelievably, he had no working plan of his own even though the canals could have been blown up by terrorists at any second. The levees were constricted on dirt, 66% of homeowners had no insurance, few if any had boats, life rafts, food and water stocks, buses and trains were not organized to help, and the Superdome and Convention Center had no back up electricity or plumbing. When you ask about why there was no plan, they say they had one but the disaster prevented them from implementing it. Only a bureaucrat would offer that up as legitimate excuse.

One 4000 square-foot building (the size of a modern home) filled with bottled water would have been enough to sustain the city for two days but it did not exist. Another similarly sized building stocked with food and basic medicines would have been enough too. All the locals could do when a disaster finally did strike was to cry to a distant Federal government thousands of miles away -- manned by incompetent bureaucrats most of whom had never been to New Orleans, let alone had the qualifications and experience to get there and rescue them. Joe Scarborough has been all over the TV complaining that all over Mississippi he saw only small private charities on the scene but no sign of Local, State or Federal government.

In the end you had complacent, incompetent locals lazily abdicating their responsibility to a tiny incompetent Federal bureaucracy thousands of miles away. In the future it must be every man for himself and his neighbor, with no expectation of much if any help from anywhere. That way more rather than less people are involved in the rescue, and the people who have the most to lose and are the most accountable have the most incentive to take care of themselves and their neighbors. In the end, freedom and individual liberty is the answer, while Hillary threatens only to make matters worse with her proposals to make the distant Federal bureaucracy even bigger. Happily, Katrina is gone, but tragically, Hillary and the Democrats remain.

 

Ted Baiamonte is author of "Understanding the Difference Between Democrats and Republicans". His blog is The Dumb Democrat, and he can be reached at bje1000@aol.com.