Mr. M,

Your street observations have not given you an accurate portrait of what Libertarianism
is. Try reading my book, “Road to Serfdom.” Just a friendly suggestion.

Yours,

F.

Smaller was meant relatively in my comparison to B’desh. Smaller in terms of resources, and not, perhaps, on ideological grounds.

Your points about a bloated government miss the point: tied into the libertarian philosophy, as I’ve seen it exercised on the street, is a contempt for government—such that when such contemptuous people get in government, they act with indifference and people die. That’s the point.

Furthermore, despite the bloat, FEMA has been shrunken. It was folded into dhs. The most telling example of the “shrunken” gov’t is when Bush is tending to those two young black women and he tells them not to worry; there’s a Salvation Army truck around. Salvation Army? not part of the gov’t. Just sayin’…

The Feds outsourced disaster relief. That’s what I mean. If that means it’s bigger or smaller, I don’t know. That’s from where the free market business comes, too.

After sharing an anecdote about a much smaller government that at
least at the moment seems much more effective in dealing with floods
(in part, surely, because floods are more common there), you conclude
that the problem has been ‘libertarian’ republicans shrinking
government. How does this make any sense at all? Has it occured to you
that the problem hasn’t been funding but rather bureaucracy? Have
you noticed that there is nothing libertarian at all about the current
Republican administration–that they’re increasing the size of gov’t
much faster than, say, Clinton did. Also, FEMA has nothing to do
with the free market. It is still a federal program. The problem may
well have been Bush folding the program into Homeland Security (read:
a bigger bureaucratic morass) and making it subsequently less
effective. Again, the problem doesn’t seem to be funding but rather
thick layers of bureaucracy. Why would you want to throw money at
this? Katrina may be (in a small way) an indictment of the very
philosophy that guides the current GOP administration, but you
completely misunderstand what that philosophy is. It isn’t small
gov’t, Goldwater conservatism, that’s for sure. It’s really the
mirror image of big government progressives with a different social
agenda.

This also made me really mad.