Hurricane Katrina, limited government, and pure public goods
Having absorbed more than a week’s worth of U.S. media commentary (primarily via the Web) on the federal government’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I’d like to round up some highlights here, draw a few tentative conclusions about the political significance of that response, and relate those conclusions to some other developments. The Economist offers a fairly accurate synthesis of the coverage:
Pundits explained the government’s failure in every way they pleased. Anti-war types blamed Iraq, particularly the fact that thousands of National Guard troops had been sent there. Environmental types blamed Mr Bush’s lackadaisical attitude to wetlands. Many Democrats saw it as proof that Mr Bush and the Republicans cared nothing for America’s poor and black. Liberals argued that Katrina showed why, as James Galbraith, a vocal leftist economist at the University of Texas, put it, the "government of the United States must be big, demanding, ambitious and expensive." A Wall Street Journal column, in contrast, argued that the hurricane showed the danger of relying too heavily on inefficient government.
The Economist leaves out the manifold personal attacks on Bush himself and members of his administration–I can’t say I objected to those analyses, but the outcome was hardly constructive. While I wouldn’t necessarily take exception to the claim of the Wall Street Journal column (nor did I read it) the disaster does seem to have exposed some of the ill effects of the Bush administration’s ideological. Economist Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, concludes:
…the federal government’s lethal ineptitude wasn’t just a consequence of Mr. Bush’s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn’t forthcoming?
Krugman’s article offers additional insight into the consequences of what happens when government agencies like FEMA are denigrated by such ideologies, but continue to exist–their budgets, and therefore power to accomplish anything, are gutted, and what remains is fodder for patronage and corruption, as demonstrated by the appointment of a friend of a close Bush confidant, apparently with no qualifications for the job, to the head of that agency.
Robert Scheer, in The Nation, echoes Krugman’s analysis:
None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life. Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that their own economic pains were caused by "quasi-socialist" government policies that aid only poor brown and black people–even as corporate profits and CEO salaries soared.
Finally, from the Harpers Web site:
This [Katrina] is the disaster our society has been working to realize for a quarter century, ever since Ronald Reagan rode into town on promises of massive tax cuts.
The author of that article furthermore links these political developments to a general decline in "the idea of community" in America, a resurgence of "the frontier ideals of ‘independence’ and the Protestant work ethic and the Horatio Alger notion that it’s all up to you."
The compulsion to shrink big government is often accompanied by the delusion that there exist sufficient "incentives" for the market to provide for all matters that were formerly the domain of the government to be handled by the private sector. But economics teaches that there are such things as "pure public goods," products and services whose communal characteristics exempt them from the logic of the marketplace–national defense is the most frequently cited example.
The point is not to make a case for the limitless expansion of the welfare state, of abdicating individual responsibility to a benevolent Big Brother who will care for every need–the 20th century is nothing if not a long lesson in what happens when too much power is concentrated in the hands of the state. The point is to recognize that there are areas where government’s capacity to intervene really matters. Providing the national infrastructure with adequate protection from natural and man-made disasters or with sufficient recovery plans is one such area.
Conducting warfare is another–yet the same downsize/privatize logic appears to be at work in Iraq. Against expert recommendations that a force of several hundred thousand troops would be needed to stablize Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Pentagon decided to do it on the cheap–most likely as much to limit political fallout of what would eventually turn into an unpopular war as to comply with Reaganite dogma–with a much smaller force. The resulting quagmire is a testimony to the wisdom of that decision. The outsourcing of military duties in Iraq to private firms has been in part an attempt to deal with the lack of sufficient manpower on the part of a "leaner" government. A recent article in Foreign Affairs suggests how that policy–at least as it’s currently being practiced–threatens American democracy, due to the lack of transparency regarding such contracts and the lack of accountability among those who fulfill them.