Salon’s Joe Conason wrote a smarmy column over the weekend taking jabs at both me and the Cato Institute (link requires you to sit through a 30-second ad). I sent the following letter to the editor in response:

Editor,

Joe Conason’s attack on an article I wrote and on my employer, the Cato Institute, is so rife with ad hominem calumnies, lazy research, and faulty logic, it’s difficult to know where to begin.

But let’s start with Conason’s predictable smear that Cato is “corporate-funded libertarianism.” I’d be happy to send Conason a copy of Cato’s 2004 Annual Report. Just six percent of Cato’s budget comes from corporate donations, a number I’d wager is significantly lower than most, if not all, left-of-center think tanks and research institutions. If Conason had bothered to browse our website, he’d see that Cato scholars have taken explicitly anti-corporate positions on issues like corporate welfare, energy research boondoggles, and farm subsidies. Our foreign policy team opposed both Iraq wars, despite funding from the oil industry. Cato scholars, like columnists for online opinion journals, take positions irrespective of who contributes to our paychecks. It makes no more sense to say Cato is “corporate-funded” than to say that Salon is.

Given that Conason’s column is on the bird flu, his “corporate-funded” tag implies Cato’s advocacy of limited government is somehow influenced by funding from the pharmaceutical industry. Not true. Cato hasn’t received pharmaceutical money in years. Furthermore, Cato President Ed Crane and Vice President for Constitutional Studies Roger Pilon have publicly advocated for drug reimportation, and Cato was staunchly opposed to the prescription drug benefit, both positions in opposition to Big Pharma.

Conason then refers to a column I wrote on government failure in response to Hurricane Katrina and Cato’s advocacy for disbanding FEMA in a convoluted effort to discern the libertarian position on government response to outbreaks of deadly diseases.

Here’s a “research” tip Conason might want to take for future columns: If you’d like to know what a libertarian thinks of a given issue, call one and ask him.

If he had called me, here is what I’d have told him: It’s perfectly acceptable for a constitutionally-limited government to act to prevent the outbreak of deadly, highly-communicable diseases. If the bird flu is as lethal and transferable as some have suggested, protection from it amounts to a public good worthy of government attention, provided said attention is proportional to the extent of the threat, transparent, and accountable.

Hurricane Katrina was different. There, government interference where it doesn’t belong both created and exacerbated the crisis. Federal manipulation of flood insurance prevented the market from making it more costly to live in high-risk areas. Moreover, the federal government’s decision to take responsibility for levee maintenance and wetlands protection prevented private entities or local governments from keeping them fortified. The federal government then neglected that responsibility.

We’ve known for decades what a Category 4 or 5 storm might do to the city, yet political leaders from both parties felt compelled to waste taxpayer money for dozens of years on thousands and thousands of less worthy projects. This is government in action. And, by the way, for every “Bridge to Nowhere” there’s a highway rest stop, public library, and useless public works project in West Virginia named for Robert Byrd. Conason’s Democrats are just as much to blame as the Republicans.

If businesses in and around New Orleans had known that (a) the federal government would play no role in building or maintaining levees, and (b) there would be no FEMA reimbursements or federal bailouts should their investments be lost to a hurricane, they’d have seen to it that New Orleans was adequately fortified decades ago. Instead, the government promised it would oversee the safety of New Orleans residents, then reneged on that promise when politics got in the way, as it almost always does.

After Katrina hit, government ineptitude continued, and ran rampant at the state, local, and federal levels, again among both Democrats and Republicans.

Meanwhile, private corporations, citizen organizations, and charities responded deftly, efficiently, and with remarkable precision. That is, when government bureaucrats weren’t getting in their way.

Much as Conason and his equally shrill counterparts on the right would like to exploit Katrina for partisan gain, the failure in preparing for and responding to its strike were failures that are inherent in and fundamental to government, not failures particular to any Republican or Democrat personalities.

Conason can mock me all he likes for writing that the citizens of New Orleans trust government to protect them again “at their peril.” But given that officials predict the city’s post-Katrina population will be a fraction of what it was before this summer, it looks like the people of New Orleans — if not Conason — have learned a thing or two about government competence.

Radley Balko

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 3:24 pm 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.