home  |  book  |

The Lesson of New Orleans The Power of the Liberal Taboos

print view

Disaster: When You Want Solutions

by Christopher Chantrill
September 11, 2005 at 1:33 pm

|

THERE IS no doubt that the Bush administration made a big blunder in its planning for hurricane Katrina. It had planned for hurricane relief in which FEMA assisted the state and local governments in getting help where it was most needed, based on the assumption that local resources could hang on until 72 to 96 hours after the disaster. That is why ever since 9/11 state and local governments have been showered with federal funding as First Responders.

Where the feds failed was in planning for another contingency, one that, in hindsight, any fool should have thought of. They should have planned for dealing with dysfunctional state and local governments that had utterly failed to prepare or to execute their disaster recovery plans, or both, but like dysfunctional families were world champs in the blame game.

But how would the feds know when a local government was dysfunctional? Here is a clue. When the local officials yell: Send everything, communicating that they haven’t a clue, you switch to Plan B. When they yell: The President doesn’t care about black/poor people, it is already too late.

Conservatives are always taken by surprise when the Democrats wave the bloody shirt of class and race, as now in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. We shouldn’t. That is how their politics works. It is not based on sensible, practical discussion of the issues, but on the raw emotions of rage and fear. You identify a need. You blame racism, classism, or sexism. You issue demands for new government programs and increased government power. Then you publicize horror stories about the sufferings of the helpless victims.

On This American Life on the weekend of 9/11, Ira Glass executed the politics of the bloody shirt flawlessly, with appalling stories of victimization and racism in New Orleans. One angry victim even complained that her government had betrayed her. That segment was next to a clip of Bill O’Reilly advising Americans not to rely on government to save them.

You can see the beauty of the racism/sexism/classism narrative. It has everything needful in a political ideology. It explains everything, and it explains it in a way calculated to provoke people to rage and to political action. “They” should have done something! “They” don’t care about people like us!

But then there was the segment about the woman who finally got out of the city when she got her union president on her cell phone. He was able to get her across the bridge to safety. And there was the woman in Atlanta, her house bursting with family from the devastated area. Prompted to demand help from the government, said that that she didn’t know about that. She was just helping her family.

There’s a moral here, courtesy of NPR. When the government betrays you, only the little platoons will save you.

So government is a bust. What about America’s big corporations? According to The Wall Street Journal, businesses from Wal-Mart to Home Depot are reacting massively and effectively to the crisis.

Home Depot’s “war room” had transferred high-demand items--generators, flashlights, batteries and lumber--to distribution areas surrounding the strike area. Phone companies readied mobile cell towers and sent in generators and fuel. Insurers flew in special teams and set up hotlines to process claims.

Wal-Mart had reopened all but 15 of its 126 stores shut down by Katrina, and had opened mini Wal-Marts to hand out goods to survivors. Pfizer piggy-backed on Wal-Mart’s supply chain to dispense pharmaceuticals. “‘What companies do is solve problems,’ says Johanna Schneider, an executive director at the Business Roundtable.” Governments, on the other hand, respond to problems.

If you want to solve a problem, turn to business. If you want to respond to a problem, turn to government, but don’t expect a solution. Oh no. Government is not in the problem solution business. That is why government programs never end, they only get bigger.

As we conservatives go forward with our imperfect program to reduce the vast Leviathan that has been created over the last century to respond to poverty, to respond to racial segregation, to respond to crime, respond to drugs, we should keep this truth in mind. Government is the domain of the First Responders. If we want to solve problems we must revive the little platoons—the families and the unions that rescued This American Life’s victims—that have withered in the shade of the Responder State. And when it comes to the big battalions, we should choose big business over big government to get the job done.

If the response to Katrina’s failures is another layer of government, we had better start laying in supplies for the next big one. For we will know that our elected responders don’t plan on a solution any time soon.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

 

 TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact