Colin calls Bush to task...

Colin said:

It's one thing to put city tasks in the hands of cities and another entirely to cut the Army Corps of Engineers budget down to 20% specifically for building these levees when the city requested them. FEMA had identified a hurricane in New Orleans as one of the top three worst disasters likely to happen this decade. The whole country suffers with New Orleans thanks to our global economy. I don't pin this on Bush nearly so much as the whole anti-government, pro-privatization crowd he and his ilk have brought into power.

This argument has several basic problems.

It is not under the federal jurisdiction to provide for local disaster prevention. That is up to the cities and states. The Army Corps of Engineers budget for this should have been cut down to 0% and not 20%. The 20% was overgenerous.

FEMA compiled data that called this a threat. Your response is to blame the feds instead of the state. I think it was awfully nice for the feds to pay for a threat assessment for nothing for Lousiana.

Also...at what point is the state responsible? At what point is the city responsible? At what point do they become responsible for having a disaster plan? From what I understand, New Orleans is a city of about 500,000 people. Cities of that size dot the California landscape...should it be up to the feds to provide a distinct disaster plan for each of them? Each city is different and will have different needs...there's no way that the feds would be as good at monitoring what those cities need as they or their state counterparts would (they could perhaps provide advisory information on what sorts and quanties of emergency supplies to have on hand).

Following your argument to its logical conclusion, what you're proposing is that the federal government be held responsible for virtually every facet of governmental intervention in American life. This is completely antiethical to what we're about. Power is reserved to the states, and then given to the federal government only within the scope of specific powers granted to it by the Constitution. Beyond that scope, the federal government cannot legally act. Such is the case with the levees in New Orleans. They can no more legally build (or upgrade or repair) a levee system for New Orleans than they can forcibly take my land for use by a private land devel...err...than a state can pass a law taxing goods from another state. It's outside the bounds of their jurisdiction.

Privatization is not inherently bad and in many cases is most excellent. For example, I remember a story on the history channel about a nuclear reactor that went bad and irradiated a HUGE area. The army was called in, but eventually it took General Electric to come in and fix it. Most private organizations don't have the idiotic and insane bureaucracies that government organizations have. This slims down costs and helps prevent the enormous cost overruns that are typically displayed by government organizations. In addition to the above reasons for privatization, there is again the issue of jurisdiction creep. In every endeavor that the government takes, their first question should be, 'Is this directly within the scope of my jurisdiction?' If the answer is 'no', then they should stop dead in their tracks.

Last but not least, the city asking for the levees does not mean that the federal government is supposed to supply them. I don't care if New Orleans needed the levees - they asked the wrong organization for them. This is like asking your plumber to replace your breaker box and getting mad when he doesn't and your house has an electrical fire as a result. It's not his job or his function to manage breaker boxes. There are others that hold that job, and they are the ones who should have taken the initiative to make sure that was taken care of.

Ultimately, the existence of a problem is not indicative of the need and jurisdiction for a governmental solution to it.

Bartleby