“Many people who think that government is the answer to our problems do not bother to check out the evidence. But it can be eye-opening to compare how private businesses responded to hurricane Katrina and how local, state and national governments responded”. –Thomas Sowell, Fema versus Wal-Mart
Update: John Tierney of the New York Times has more.
But it can be eye-opening to compare how private businesses responded to hurricane Katrina and how local, state and national governments responded
absolutely.
private donations to aid and rebuild after Katrina: $1 billion
government actions to aid and rebuild after Katrina: $200 billion.
the fact that the government wasn’t quicker to respond is because the government (including potentially the local governments) is run by people who are fundamentally incompetant. at the federal level, this incompetance isn’t surprising, given that the people who currently run the federal government don’t believe that government can provide effective solutions to problems (since these people run the government, of course, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy). but, in fact, there are no alternatives to government action in the face of this level of catastrophe.
No satya, I disagree, I think this is the reason why fundamentally government is always less efficient.
A picture is worth a thousand words, 155 reasons why the government was slower….
http://angry-economist.russnelson.com/155reasons.html
This tragedy does not show how governments respond to disasters, it shows how bad governments respond to disasters.
Its like using the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to explain how bad baseball is.
Governments can be better in a time of crisis like NYC under Guliani after 9/11, or FEMA after the flooding in the northern plains under Witt.
Have you ever seen the org chart for a large multinational holding comany - same thing.
Satya is right, W and his boys do not believe government can solve any problems so they either through intent or gross negligence see to it that government fails. They see crucial federal agencies like FEMA as a place to put cronies in at the top.
Williams commentary is too tied into his own partisan agenda that it overlooks the facts of the matter. He states that Louisiana governor and New Orleans mayor refused to ask for help from the White House because he is in the othr party. The facts according to Time magazine are that on Monday as the storm was still bearing down and the levees were straining, Governor Blanco placed a call to President Bush to ask for help, this call was not returned for several hours and no white house officials could be tracked down. Governor Blanco had to call the president back several hours later after her call went unreturned.
On the other hand Gov. Barbour of Missippi, the former chair of the RNC who was instrumental in getting Bush elected/appointed in 2000 was quoted as saying on that same Monday, Bush and he were in constant contact, to the point where Bush was calling Barbour for updates.
Michael,
I agree that Bush could have done more, he certainly took to long to react, but even if he had reacted sooner, I think you put too much weight on what he could have done. The reason New York was better than New Orleans is really as simple as Guliani vs Nagin. In other words, it was because of superior bottom up management that the situation turned out differently, not because of anything the government did.
You write, Satya is right, W and his boys do not believe government can solve any problems so they either through intent or gross negligence see to it that government fails. They see crucial federal agencies like FEMA as a place to put cronies in at the top.
But this is really no different than Democrats, Investors Business Daily writes, “Bill Clinton’s choice to be Southwest Regional FEMA director in 1993 was even less qualified, earning his job handling disaster recovery of a different sort. Raymond ‘Buddy’ Young, a former Arkansas state trooper, got his choice assignment after leading efforts to discredit other state troopers in the infamous Troopergate scandal. If a storm like Katrina struck the Big Easy back then, Young would’ve been in charge. ”
This is a constant among all politicians, the incentives are just too strong to avoid. Stuff like this would be much less likely to happen in the private sector. Than there is the issue of inefficiency, in the private sector, inefficiency carries some real consequences, yet in the public sector, there are no consequences. This is how economist Arnold Kling explains the difference between large public sector and large private sector organizations, “Large organizations, in the private sector and the public sector alike, are inherently dehumanizing to employees, clumsy, inflexible, and unable to handle sudden new challenges. In addition, public sector organizations are hampered by political constraints and the stultification that comes from the absence of competition. In the private sector, the pressure of competition means that the surviving large organizations tend to be slightly less dysfunctional than those that go out of business”.
Sebastian Holsclaw described it this way,
“Large company bureaucracy can sometimes minimize the inherent problems of bureaucracy because they are constantly disciplined by losing money when they don’t act properly. Government bureaucracy almost never has that kind of month-to-month accountability. Small government bureaucracy can be disciplined by other means–usually social connections with the community. These types of things don’t scale up into a large bureaucracy. The military sometimes avoids this trap by repeatedly focusing the minds of their soldiers on the fact that their own personal survival depends on working efficiently–and even then the military often has the kinds of problems that are endemic in a large government bureaucracy. An organization like FEMA, with tests to its efficiency often coming years apart, is highly likely to be deeply inefficient….”
All of this is inherent in government agencies, which is why they always tend to under perform private industries, and this becomes more evident especially in times of emergency, where efficiency matters most.
The reaction of people against the federal reaction to Katrina is universally, “too slow, not responsive enough.” These are, in fact indictments of big government and centralization. The federal government may have large resources (taken from you and I), but it cant possibly have the intimate knowledge of every local situation to act effectively and quickly. If FEMA were strictly a framework for coordinating between local agencies there would be more resources available to those local agencies and they would be more self-reliant.
Private companies do not always react better to disasters. Don’t forget those nursing homes and hospitals that ignored government evacuation orders that caused the deaths of scores of elderly and infirmed patients were privately owned.
Also, in an emergency, I’d take a former state trooper over a guy who judges horsie shows any day of the week.
Michael,
Do you think that wouldn’t have happened had they been government run nursing homes and hospitals? My point is this, when you compare apples to apples, it is always going to be the private sector that performs better precisely because the private sector has more checks, has more incentives to be efficient, and because of such, has less inefficient bureaucracy. In other words, yes the private sector makes mistakes too, but those mistakes are much more likely from a government sector than a private sector.