When that raging cunt bitch Katrina devoured New Orleans I thought it would present a challenge to some of my libertarian beliefs. I dealt with some of these first concerns in an earlier post, but I still thought that during the rescue and clean up operations some facets of the State would show competence, and then I might feel obligated to argue that private forces could have done a better job. This no longer concerns me. If there was any agency of government, federal, state, or local, that proved itself capable during this crisis I am unaware of it. Fact of the matter is that private charity and enterprise have been the only viable solutions to this problem, and the government has pretty much just stood in their way. You do not have to take my word for it; go read every post from The Agitator from September 8 (with the exception of all the email responses he posted) and see if you disagree.
I also find it intensely disturbing that on Sunday it will be 9/11/05, and the experience of New Orleans only proves that the government has made no material progress towards improving its response to disaster, whether natural or man made, in the four years since a tragedy of such a magnitude last struck this country. I knew all along that the government wastes money, misallocates resources, etcetera, but I thought with so much extra spending we might make some improvement. Take the space program, for instance. Sure, it was a gigantic waste of money, but we did actually put men on the moon and invent Tang for fuck’s sake. That is something, and it seems that for all the money allocated to Homeland Security we have nothing.
But I don’t really blame who have overseen these boondoggles….as such. Yeah, maybe someone else could have marginally improved this aspect or that detail, but failure is just the nature of the State beast, and this is true for literally hundreds of reasons. To name but a few:
1) It’s a monopoly. With no competitors, the government lacks any reason to improve its services or cut its costs.
2) People in the government frequently have the perverse incentive to fail, so that they are rewarded with larger budgets, so that they may “improve.”
3) It lacks any means of determining if a project is worthwhile or not. Because most taxes paid to the government are not for rendering any specific service, people in the government are incapable of knowing if people would actually pay the price they do (through compulsory taxes) for a given service, i.e. if that service is profitable to the public.
For these reasons and more, I can still say, “I hate the State.”
