KATRINA AND HILLARY

Speaking for the freedom loving Republican, Thomas Jefferson, who said, "the gov't which governs best, governs least," was Bill O'Reilly who said, after Katrina, in his less artful way, "the govt is never going to help you." And, speaking for the gov't loving Federalists was Hillary Clinton who said to Charles Gibson, "this is a time for massive public works spending all over America." Of course she did not mention in her brain dead, numbingly liberal Democratic way, that this then was also a time for massive new taxes that would massively hamstring the economy.

Katrina did indeed highlight a massive failure of gov't, but to Republicans this is more or less what you'd expect from gov't, even a gov't in which they have a razor thin majority. Of course, though, it would be highly impolitic to mention it out loud in country with an increasingly Democratic soul. For Hillary and the Democrats the massive failure of gov't is a yet another wonderful opportunity to make the govt bigger and more powerful, and, in theory, better, rather than shrink it. To Republicans this is like making a car bigger to get better gas mileage out of it. After all, four years after 9/11 the gov't homeland security bureaucracy is 100 times bigger than ever, and chock full of wonderful, caring, sensitive bureaucrats too; yet it was perfectly paralyzed by Katrina?

Do we need to get rid of it or do we need to have caring Democrats manage an even bigger version of it? Hillary's standard Democratic answer seems preposterous given that it has just been tried here and now, and incidentally by every country on earth prior to Jefferson, who with the opposite theory, managed to create the greatest country on earth with, if you can believe it, the greatest freedom from bureaucracy on earth. And this is not to mention the educational value of other recent bureaucratic mishaps such as The Great Depression and WW2 that resulted, Vietnam, Iraq, the $500 billion Saving and Loan Scandal, 9/11, New Orleans, a Southern border that remains bureaucratically open to nuclear, chemical, and biological terrorists, trillions that has been stolen from Social Security, the famous Federal Budget which recently attached a new 10 year $175,000 debt to each American family, and the near genocidal welfare programs of the 1960s.

So why is it that even well intentioned gov't is so purely incompetent? Why can a businessman make a super computer, plasma TV, or PET scan machine from scratch, while a gov't bureaucrat can't drop food and water from a plane on starving people? It's simple really, the super computer that exists today was actually created with accumulated knowledge from 1000s of people all over the world competing with each other over 100s of years to gradually and consistently develop the technologies used in the super computer that exists today. It's called capitalism. A bureaucrat never has to compete with anybody, anywhere on earth, at any time, in order to earn a living by being competent, even at dropping food and water from a plane on starving people. Moreover, he never even has to practice doing it, not once; so he is purely incompetent at it. When the time came to do his job, he was no more qualified to do it than a kindergarten teacher would be to make a jet engine. And still this Soviet style, bureaucrat buffoon remains as the heart and soul of the Democratic Party while heroic, capitalist businessmen, who willingly live and die each day based exclusively on their competence, are the enemy?

So what is the solution? Local gov't is inherently smaller, less bureaucratic, and more accountable to the people it serves than the Federal gov't. And, the damage they do is restricted to their own locality. The Feds can't have a specific disaster plan for every town in America, nor can they practice it. What they can do is order every town to have a plan and to practice it as if it was really important to plan for disaster. The New Orleans Mayor was screaming and yelling at the Feds as if his city was their responsibility because, unbelievably, he had no working plan of his own even though the New Orleans canals had no shut off gates and always could have been blow up by terrorists at any second; with ease. The levees were constructed on dirt and were sinking, 66% of homeowners had no insurance, few if any had boats, life rafts, food and water stocks, buses and trains were not organized to help, the Super Dome and Convention Center had no effective back up electricity, plumbing, or security, and the city's water pumps (with twice the capacity of Niagara Falls) were built below sea level with no backup electric power and so were swamped and perfectly dysfunctional precisely when they needed to function most.

Before the storm, the Mayor said on TV while discussing the hurricane PAM simulation, "the whole key is for every individual and family to have their own plan including food, water and transportation,". But then after Katrina, the people who did not listen, who deliriously slept comfortably each night, literally below an ocean of water, were victims and so couldn't, politically correctly, be held responsible for their own obvious negligence, but the Federal Gov't could, at least by default. When you ask New Orleans why there was no plan, they say they had one but the disaster prevented them from implementing the disaster plan? Only a bureaucrat squirming to evade responsibility could offer that up as legitimate excuse.

One 4000 square foot building (the size of a modern home, secure to Cat. 5 standards) filled with bottled water would have been enough to sustain the city for two days but it did not exist. Another similarly sized building stocked with food and basic medicines would have been enough too. All the locals could do when a disaster finally did strike was cry to a distant Federal Gov't 1000s of miles away; manned by incompetent bureaucrats most of whom had never been to New Orleans, let alone had the qualifications, experience, and equipment to get there and rescue them. As of last night (a full seven days after the hurricane) Joe Scarborough was all over the TV screaming at the top of his lungs that all over Mississippi he saw only small private charities on the scene but no sign of incompetent, paralyzed Local, State or Federal gov't.

In the end you had mysteriously complacent and incompetent locals lazily and irresponsibly abdicating their responsibility to an incompetent Federal bureaucracy 1000s of miles away. In the future, it must be every man for himself and his neighbor (perhaps with the aid of a pre-stocked, gov't mandated, "go kit") with no expectation of much if any immediate help from anywhere. San Francisco, CA. and Wilmington, NC, two likely disaster spots, have thankfully acknowledged this in the wake of Katrina. When responsibility is local , more rather than less people are involved in the rescue, and the people who have the most to lose and are the most accountable have the most incentive to take care of themselves and their neighbors. This is especially true given that smart terrorists might elect, for example, to nuke several cities at the same time just as they elected to blow up several buses at the same time in London. If you think the bureaucrats were befuddled by one disaster, imagine 5 !

In the end, freedom and individual liberty is the answer. Hillary threatens only to make matters worse with her knee jerk proposals to make the distant Federal bureaucracy even bigger and even more responsible, while it is the locals who must purposively take more of the responsibility. Happily, Katrina is gone, but tragically, Hillary and the Democrats remain.

http://thedumbdemocrat.blogspot.com/
Ted Baiamonte