Regarding John Thune and Ellsworth I used a quarterback analogy. The quarterback gets too much blame when the team loses and too much credit when the team wins. I guess the same goes for presidents. Bush is getting more blame than he deserves over the New Orleans tragedy. Mind you, I am not whining. It's the nature of the presidency. It wouldn't matter who was president; things on the ground would be the same. But, if you don't want to accept the responsibility, don't run for the office.
That said, the inability of all levels of government to respond to this event is troubling. I find Jonah Goldberg to be convincing. Like him I doubt the sincerity of past calls by Democrats to fund municipal disaster relief planning. I know enough about how government spending works to agree that at least half of the reasons this money was being clamored for was the desire by cities to pad their budgets with federal money. Why pay for things yourself when you can get someone else to pay for them? But like him I find the normally profligate Republicans unwillingness to fund this at higher levels disappointing. I call them profligate because for all their talk about reducing government spending they haven't even been able to keep the rate of increase down to inflation. Yet in the wake of 9-11 disaster relief should have been a priority. And I suppose Bush will take some of the blame for this, but as I mentioned the other day (scroll down) the work on disaster relief funding may have never crossed a political appointee's desk except as a final report to the FEMA director and the Secretary of Homeland Security.
I think this points to a systematic problem with big government. First, as many at NRO's Corner are mentioning, Congress has been very good at blowing all kinds of money on low priority highway projects when they could have been funding disaster relief preparation. But which projects are a priority? This very website congratulated John Thune for all the money he got for South Dakota in the recent highway bill. The Democratic leaning blogs did the same for their party members in Congress. Anyone want to give any of that money back? How about agriculture spending? Anyone? Last year's Senate race was run largely on the subject of who could get the most federal money for South Dakota. The problem is every congressional and Senate race has that as a major theme. As I often tell my students, when federal money is spent in your district it is called much needed government spending to address a great concern of good hardworking people. When it is spent in someone else's district it is wasteful pork barrel spending the drives us deeper into debt. The government is rife with all sorts of spending programs meant to reward particular constituencies, and this spending defies coordination. See Jonathan Rauch's Government's End for a good treatment of the problem. Rauch shows why the government, for various reasons, is becoming less and less effective at solving important problems. I say "various reasons," but those reasons center around size. The government is very big, and very big tends to move very slowly.
Perhaps Daniel Henninger has it right. It's time to privatize disaster relief, he argues. Without sinking into more public policy studies, one of the basic bureaucratic pathologies is "bureaucratic duplication," i.e., multiple bureaucracies doing at least partially the same job. This is a problem in part because it wastes resources. But the more important problem is that the proverbial right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. As Henninger points out, government bureaucracies are notoriously bad at talking to each other. This only gets worse as the bureaucracy grows. Just yesterday I was discussing with a fellow employee at my government bureaucracy how hard it is to get a couple hundred people pulling in the same direction. Now multiply that number by 100 or 1,000. Anyone who has experienced trying to get a large group to engage in some collective action knows the problem. It is doubly true in government where the incentives to improve delivery of goods and services just aren't there. I think Henninger's proposal has its flaws, but it is at least worth thinking about. One thing's for sure: four years after 9-11 our disaster relief programs have been revealed as disasters. Bush will and should take some of the blame for this, but probably not as much as the left-wing blogs are giving him.
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