I find it refreshing that so many media figures are demanding accountability from government officials and at least recognizing the government failure, here. The problem is, inevitably, they’ll do as E.J. Dionne has done, and determine that the solution is a bigger, more comprehensive, richer version of the same government that failed, and continues to fail on a massive scale with its most basic responsibility.

In one of his daily letters to the editor, New Orleans native Don Boudreaux replies:

Dear Editor:

E.J. Dionne says that rescue and rebuilding efforts, of the kind needed in New Orleans, require government (”When Government is ‘Good’,” Sept. 2). He even suggests that government is our friend of last resort. Hmm. Government has utterly failed. It failed to prepare, despite years of warning that a hurricane could devastate my hometown. And it is failing now - tragically - at its most fundamental responsibility: maintaining law.

Some friend.

Why should we trust this inevitably centralized and politicized institution?

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University

On a related note, this quote from President Bush on Good Morning America is simply inexplicable:

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded. And now we are having to deal with it and will.”

By every account I’ve seen, that’s complete and utter bullshit. Scientists, local officials, journalists, and engineers have been warning the federal government about the levees for years.

The federal government assigned the Army Corps of engineers the responsibility of protecting New Orleans in the 1920s — in effect making any local or private efforts to maintain the levees impossible. It then refused to give the Corps of Engineers enough money to do the job adequately, even as — over the last ten years or so — scientists have warned of what might come of a direct hit on the city.

Many of you have questioned (a polite way of putting it) my assertion that protecting New Orleans was the federal government’s responsibility. I’d suggest that protecting us from all outside threats, from deadly communicable diseases to hurricanes to meteor impacts to invading armies, all fall within the legitimate definition of “public goods.” This isn’t akin to continually rebuilding vacation homes in the Outter Banks. New Orleans has been around for hundreds of years. Many people had no choice but to live there — no means to live anywhere else. But even conceding that point, in this case, the federal government made it impossible for anyone else to do the job. It then failed in what it set out to do. In that sense, the government most certainly has blood on its hands. And I think it’s most certainly appropriate to question the priorities of an adminstration that was made aware of this threat and ignored it and, now pretends it never knew the levees were vulnerable and, all the while, has spent billlions of dollars rebuilding a country we needlessly tore down.

Judging from email, many of you disagree with me. Sorry. But this was foreseeable. All of it. Government has failed, at all levels. And unlike what happened after September 11, this time there needs to be some accountability.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 2nd, 2005 at 10:48 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.