Only Big Government Can Save Us from Big Storms, Says The New York Times. Ummm ... Really?

As Matt Welch
mentions below, as part of its ongoing effort to win Barack Obama another
triumphant four years in the White House, during which time he can
complete the task of raising the United States to the glorious
heights of Great Britain circa 1975 take a moderate,
restrained tone on matters of national import, The New York
Times tells us that Mitt Romney is bad bad bad — and wrong —
to
suggest that anybody other than ginormous central government
has any business responding to storms and tantrum-ish eruptions
from Mother Nature. As it so happens, Mitt is bad bad bad
— and wrong, but not on this issue. Even if he did squishily
back
off his point, a bit.

Editorialized The
New York Times:

Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of “big
government,” which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it. At a
Republican primary debate last year, Mr. Romney was asked whether
emergency management was a function that should be returned to the
states. He not only agreed, he went further.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Every time you have an occasion to take
something from the federal government and send it back to the
states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further
and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”
…

It’s an absurd notion …

As it so happens, I’ve written on this issue before. So let me
lazily quote myself rather than come up with something new.
Specifically, I’m pulling from a
piece I wrote for the Las Vegas Review-Journal after
Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA apparently learned that thousands of people were waiting
for rescue at the convention center from TV news reports. Local
officials have little reason to boast; the already notorious New
Orleans Police Department fell apart as soon as the storm hit.
According to The New York Times, about a third of the force simply
walked off the job. Local reports say that many officers used their
badges and guns to join the ranks of looters. Says the on-the-spot
Interdictor blog, “The people we’ve been talking to say they are
not recognizing the NOPD as a legitimate authority anymore.”

Even as they fumbled their own responses to the disaster,
government officials found time to block private relief efforts.
The Salvation Army was initially forbidden to send boats to rescue
refugees sheltered in one of its facilities, one of the group’s
officials told the press. It seems the private relief
organization’s efforts didn’t fit the government’s schedule.
Likewise, the American Red Cross said. Days after the storm hit,
“The state Homeland Security Department had requested — and
continues to request — that the American Red Cross not come back
into New Orleans following the hurricane.”

Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish president, put it best when he
told interviewers, “Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater
New Orleans area and bureaucracy needs to stand trial before
Congress today.”

I do apologize for a mention in that column of “Road
Warior” conditions in the Superdome, since
we learned soon after I penned those words that the carnage was
way overstated and not so carnage-y, after all.

But government officials really did prevent experienced
private relief organizations and convoys of supplies from reaching
people in need in the wake of Katrina. Police and bus drivers
really did abandon their posts. And private companies
really were ready to help. Somebody at the Times must
listen to NPR, and just may remember a 2011 report in which that
exalted media outlet
told us:

Forecasters don’t expect Hurricane Irene to make landfall until
Saturday. But for nearly a week now, big-box retailers like Walmart
and Home Depot have been getting ready.

They’ve deployed hundreds of trucks carrying everything from
plywood to Pop-Tarts to stores in the storm’s path. It’s all
possible because these retailers have turned hurricane preparation
into a science — one that government emergency agencies have begun
to embrace.

“Begun to embrace,” because they’re learning from companies like
Wal-Mart, which was on the scene at Katrina with convoys of
emergency supplies. Continued NPR in its nasty, right-wing way:

Mark Cooper is Walmart’s head of emergency management. Before
his current job, he was the head of emergency management for the
state of Louisiana. But in 2005, he was an emergency worker from
Los Angeles who was sent to New Orleans as a first responder after
Hurricane Katrina.

“We were there a week after the levees broke, and actually it
was a Walmart that I went into to get supplies for myself after we
arrived in Louisiana,” Cooper says.

It was one of the few stores still operating, he says.

Walmart is able to anticipate surges in demand during
emergencies by using a huge historical database of sales from each
store as well as sophisticated predictive techniques, Cooper
says.

Maybe it’s true that “disaster coordination is one of the most
vital functions of ‘big government,’” But we should probably take
that job away and let people who know what they’re doing handle the
heavy lifting.

2012-10-30 13:01:52

Source: http://reason.com/blog/2012/10/30/only-big-government-can-save-us-from-big