When the levees are down

When things are at their worst, the maxim goes, that's when you find out who your real friends are. If that's the case, who were the better friends to beleaguered folks on the Gulf coast, post-Katrina? Mayor Ray Nagin, who wouldn't follow his own city's disaster plan? Or Wal Mart, which has managed to improvise relief distribution both before and after the storm? Would you be better off aided by director Brown's FEMA, or the Southern Baptists?

I admit to indulging in more than my share of hissing and spitting over which layer of government has exhibited the most incompetence during the disaster. A big problem with this line of argument though is that it implicitly assumes that government should be entrusted with all these responsibilities. If I paid my garbage man, my barber, and my neighbor's kid to team up and perform heart bypass surgery on me, it'd sound silly to complain afterward that it didn't go perfectly well. That would be true even if I gave them a lot of my money to do it.

You want a mountain of water and food somewhere at a certain time? You want transport? Yes, I know that you gave the government a lot of your money, but what if they don't deliver? It's almost impossible to sue them. It's equally hard to hold an actual government worker accountable -- whether criminally, civilly, or even to impede his prospects for advancement. You're much better off using your money (or pooling group money) to contract with private organizations for such things.

If you want government to do something well, then for heaven's sake give it less to do. Besides affording the government fewer meaningless distractions, it also costs less in taxes, leaving more for people to use in taking care of themselves.

That said, there will always be the infirm, and especially the poor. Lower taxes mean little to those who aren't paying in the first place. What becomes of them when the government is not tasked with their sheltering, feeding, evacuation, and so on? I say give this a try: have government concentrate on maintaining order. Just do that! Where there is order, then volunteers, charities, and even business can work to bring food, shelter, and transport. Bus drivers and Red Cross workers will not come when they are being shot at. This is understandable and already amply demonstrated.

Obviously, such devolution of government duties is a counterintuitive notion to many, but what else is on the table? The government failed to meet expectations, and American government is already the most humongous, most lavishly-funded the world has ever known. Is it wise to give it more money, to make it bigger?

Even if people refuse to rein in government, at the very least could we refrain from calling upon the government to hobble the companies that invariably come through as benefactors in times of crisis? In a similar spirit of tolerance, how about cutting the Southern Baptists a little slack when they ask permission to put up a nativity scene in the middle of town this Christmas? They're feeding tens of thousands of people on their own initiative right now. That should be worth something, even when it's not government doing it.