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Depending on Big Government Philip V. Brennan When the latest round of indignation over the handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster hit last week with the release of a super-critical House report, an old joke came to mind - the one about the man who announces "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." The sarcasm best expresses the absurdity of expecting big and remote government to do anything to help anyone without making a mess of it. That's simply the nature of big government. It has been said that governments do only two things well: collect taxes and start wars. Hurricane Katrina fit in neither category. Think about it: Faced with what has been rightly called the worst natural disaster in American history, for days the federal, state and local governments proved unable to cope with Katrina's aftermath. They were swamped by a series of catastrophic events for which they were unprepared and of a magnitude for which they could never have been prepared. Anyone expecting the feds to step into such a mess from Washington, a thousand miles away, and make everything right has to fit in the same category with people who believe in the tooth fairy. Yet the federal government and the Bush administration have been castigated for their tardy and inadequate response to a tragedy taking place on the Gulf Coast, a thousand miles away from the White House. Regardless of the legitimacy of the critics' complaints, one has to ask, "What the hell did you expect?" Story Continues Below
Mucking things up is what big government does – always. That is its nature. It can't help itself. It's too big, it's too unwieldy, and it's too full of people who can't bring themselves to work together for the common good because their main motivation is protecting their turf from incursions by other parts of the bureaucracy. To expect it to move like a jack rabbit when it is by nature a ponderous multi-headed tortoise is to expect the kind of miracles that occur only in drug-induced fantasies. Critics point to New York's handling of 9/11 and wonder why the feds couldn't accomplish what Mayor Giuliani and his administration managed to do, forgetting that it was their city, they knew it inside out, and the disaster occurred in a limited area, and not in the hundreds of miles of Gulf Coast Katrina devastated. Most attention has been focused on Louisiana and New Orleans, and the real failure here lay in the hands of the governor and the mayor, neither of whom had a single ounce of Rudy Giuliani's capability and street smarts. Both floundered and flipped about like fish stranded on a boardwalk. Giuliani knew his city, Mayor Nagin acted as if he were a stranger in his own town, and Governor Blanco acted as if she wished she'd never heard of New Orleans. The responsibility for dealing with the havoc wrought by Katrina, and then her nasty little sister Rita, lay with the local authorities. That's the way our system is structured. Obviously they were in way over their heads – no city or state in the nation has the resources to deal with the unprecedented catastrophe that struck the Gulf Coast and they were right in seeking disaster aid from anyplace they could find it. Obviously, that led them to Washington, where all the money is said to be. But in the case of New Orleans and Louisiana, while local officials demanded immediate massive federal assistance, thereby putting themselves into the hands of the feds, they insisted on running the show themselves. Give us your money, Uncle Sam, send us everything we need, and then butt out. They should have known better. Take Caesar's coin and you have to take Caesar's rule. In this case, they got FEMA and Michael Brown and a shower of money they had no idea how to spend. History has shown that federal money sent to New Orleans somehow vanishes – it's a case of Big Easy come, Big Easy go. When the feds sent them money to bolster the dikes, they probably thought it was meant to support the local lesbian community. They refused to recognize that folks from distant Washington could not be expected to know every nook and cranny in their bailiwicks, the circumstances peculiar to the area, and moreover are incapable of rapid response to problems with which they are totally unfamiliar and have never been forced to deal with in the past. Katrina was such a problem. As a result of all of this, it was not until the military – government's only efficient arm that knows what it's doing and usually does it well – was on the ground and got the situation unstuck from stupid that things began to improve. Since then, despite all Uncle Sam's grandiose plans to rebuild a bigger and better New Orleans, he has reverted to his Uncle Klutz mode, state and city officials are wondering around like a bunch of lost children, and confusion reigns supreme alongside the Big Muddy. But all this begs the question. For some reason large numbers of the American people continue to accept the fallacy that the guy who says he's from the government is really there to help, and can help. We just hate to admit that he can't and that while he's at it is going to make things worse. That's how it has always been, and will always be. We keep forgetting what the Founding Fathers knew and what all history has taught: that the government closest to the people – in our case at the village, county, and then state levels – is the most capable of dealing with local problems. It's called the doctrine of subsidiarity, and it is a rock-solid protection against government excesses and big-government avarice and stupidity. The closer to home the rascals are, the easier it is to throw them out. The ones in Washington – the people who make up that bloated klutzocracy – are beyond our reach. Besides that, even if we could get our hands on them, they can't be fired. It's in their contract. Yet we keep looking up to the federal level for solutions to a whole host of problems when most of the time the answers are right outside on our doorsteps. That inevitably leads us to accept the Marxist prescription that big government knows all, unmindful of the fact that total dependence upon distant government to do everything leads inevitably to a socialistic system, and wherever socialism has been imposed on a nation, it has failed and failed dismally. Make no mistake about it; those most outraged at Washington's inability to handle the Katrina disaster properly are mostly the same people who want to give more and more power to big brother, allegedly on the specious grounds that given that power, big brother will be able take care of things such as the Katrina debacle. We are witnessing a prime example of that arrant nonsense in the global-warming hysteria. Led by the likes of Al Gore and a shameless contingent of scientists dependent on grants from the global-warming autocracy and determined to hang on to them even to the extent that they are willing to distort science concerning climate, we are being fed lies meant to convince us that we face a climate catastrophe that only government action can forestall. Government in this case is an international authority like the all-wise and super-efficient and thoroughly Marxist United Nations, which would oversee the enforcement of laws governing the world's economy as envisioned in the Kyoto Accords. This is Karl Marx's dream come true: instant socialism on a global scale, and Crazy Al is doing everything in his power to make it happen. Don't delude yourself into believing that Mr. Gore really believes that any kind of climate change that's in the cards can be averted by such puny steps as cutting fossil fuel emissions. That's not his goal. If Mother Nature has it in mind to slap us with some kind of drastic alteration of the climate, she's going to do it and laugh herself silly over Crazy Al's efforts to thwart her. As I write this, much of the nation in locked in a deep freeze. Weather anomalies such as record snowfalls like the 13 feet of the white stuff that fell on parts of Japan recently are popping up all over the globe. If your refrigerator begins to lose its ability to refrigerate – let's say it is losing its coolants – you wouldn't expect it to keep its contents ice cold by blowing luke-warm air at it, would you? If the polar ice caps are melting and thinning, as Crazy Al and his global-warming fanatics would have us believe, how are they capable of creating the incredibly frigid conditions of the kind we are seeing now all across the globe? The polar regions are the world's refrigerators. If they are melting, how can they create the kind of bitter cold weather the world is experiencing with increasing frequency? What we are facing is the onset of an era of glaciation – something that Mother Nature does every 90,000 years or so. It's her way of spring cleaning, so to speak. And nothing can stop her from doing it. Most of all, not any form of bumbling big government.
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers He can be reached at phil@newsmax.com
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