All Wise, All Powerful:
Government Can Do Anything! And Everything!
Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, E. J. Dionne, and others are insisting that the disasters in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast show the failure of …. limited government. It couldn’t just be a case of government failure per se. Nor could it have been the failure of government to limit itself to really important tasks and instead subsidizing such worthy projects as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland or a $250,000 study of caffeinated chewing gum. I will take such people more seriously when they come up with lists of things that could be cut in the federal budget in order to pay for the things that they consider more important. (And the idea that the Republicans have been slashing the budget is not sustained by even a quick look at the facts.)
In Krugman-Dowd-Dionne World, there are no tradeoffs, no choices, no hard problems that waving a magic wand (or a gun) and mumbling the right words (call them “legislation,” “regulation,” and “edit”) can’t solve.
The scientific study of politics doesn’t posit magical powers or a world in which choices are not necessary. It focuses on the incentives that makers of choices face. And Katrina is a good example of perverse incentives, perverse from the perspective of the public good, that is. In the market, firms and entrepreneurs are rewarded for success and penalized for failure. In government, agencies and their managers are rewarded for failure (budgets go up) and penalized for short-term success, generating more long-run failure (things such as, say, bridge or levee maintenance are ignored and cut back in favor of building more fun new things, no matter how useless, for the reason that no politician ever cut a ribbon over a filled pothole).
Krugman, Dowd, and Dionne are about as serious in their analysis as the crackpots who are calling Hurricane Katrina God’s punishment for the Iraq war.
Good post.
Yeah, well said. I really like the picture.
Thanks for the item. Any ideas on why so many people believe that a person with a government ID can somehow do more than a person without the ID?
(And the idea that the Republicans have been slashing the budget is not sustained by even a quick look at the facts.)
True. However, it is also true that the Republicans have been cutting funding for the Corps of Engineers for levey improvements; cut funding to LA’s disaster programs, and… at least profoundly neglected FEMA.
It strikes me as yet another example of the moral hazard in this sort of thing; I suspect the locals would have done more in terms of local preperation, if they hadn’t gotten promises (and contributed taxes to) the federal efforts that never happened.
Which, of course, leaves us with the worst of all worlds – a dead city, high taxes, and a smirking president.
It is more believable to me that Katrina is our punishment for letting the neoconservatives start a war with Iraq than that a bigger central gov’t could protect us from the aftermath of disasters like Katrina.
I recently heard an enlightening interview with disaster preparedness official from the state of Washington — he observed that post-911 the feds have de-emphasized disaster preparedness in favor of terrorist preparedness, which is different in a number of respects. Even more telling, he claimed that 4 years ago FEMA spent 75% of its efforts (time? budget? manpower? he wasn’t clear) on disaster preparedness, but now it is 25%. And even more telling, of the remaining 75% is divided between terrorism-prep (25%) and administration (50%) which he said largely stemmed from FEMA becoming part of the gigantic new Dept of Homeland Security bureaucracy.
So here’s an econ quiz for Krugman et al.: How would sacrificing more of our resources (and more of our freedom)to dysfunctional bureaucracies make us safer?
Answer:…..(5 points, Paul)
Excellent post.