Well, one of their most powerful senators spends her time writing a romance novel that makes Harlequin look like Chekov. Their bloggers spend a lot of time catfighting.

But fear not, for the next election they are taking decisive action by coming up with a vacuous slogan.

Given that Bush has approval numbers in the 30s, I think we have a real contest going to see who can turn off voters faster. Time to vote Libertarian. I mean, even the blue guy doesn’t sound as dumb as Boxer or Bush.

I’ve seen (and received) arguments that what happened in the preparation for and aftermath of Katrina was a political failure, in the sense that we simply elected the wrong guys and if we just would elect the right ones, all this would go away. Such things aren’t inherent to government, they argue, just the current, exceptional crop of incompetents. This accounts for both the response to the crisis as well as the failure to fund flood control measures.

I have some sympathy with the view that there is more than typical incompetence at work here, particularly in the leadership of FEMA. However, I maintain that the failures are pretty typical of a national government of a large country in effectively dealing with the sorts of things that insurance, private businesses, and private charities do much more effectively. Furthermore, the failure to address flood control started before January 2001 and is not a failure of funding, but a failure of budget allocation caused by just the sort of short-term pork projects that are endemic to a representative democracy–which is why it’s so important to keep the feds out of anything that they don’t absolutely have to be involved in.

Fortunately, Russell Roberts has summed up the two key examples that, if not refuting the political failure argument, should give its proponents pause to check for leaks in their rhetorical boat.

The first is the fact that over ten thousand people died in a natural disaster, and the government failed to act quickly enough, especially ignoring the elderly and poor. Damn those free market Republicans! Oh, wait, I meant the socialized-medicine-having French, from a story entitled France heat wave death toll set at 14,802.

The new estimate comes a day after the French Parliament released a harshly worded report blaming the deaths on a complex health system, widespread failure among agencies and health services to coordinate efforts, and chronically insufficient care for the elderly.

Sounds like it would take more than voting for Al Gore or Hillarycare.

Oh, and turns out the Army Corps of Engineers had a fair amount of money in Louisiana…unfortunately, they just didn’t spend it on flood control.

In Katrina’s wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush’s administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.

Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state’s congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana’s representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.

Damn Republicans, voting for pork!

Oh, wait:

For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations. The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River — now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project’s congressional godfather — for barge traffic that is less than forecast.

If this is a political failure, it’s a failure of the entire political system, not just a few miscreants here and there. If you want to preserve government power, you can either reduce political control of the system, which is more like the system France has, or you can attempt to give more political control, even further rewarding short-term political ends over long-term planning.

Or, you can try taking government out of the equation when it has consistently failed to address a problem and there are viable alternatives. Ending federal flood insurance would, in the long-term, prevent people from living in flood-prone areas. In the short term, letting private charities handle disaster response would get food and first aid get to disaster areas. If there are security problems, you can either use private forces or call the government in to restore order to those pockets of insecurity. However, if people get enough to eat they’ll be less likely to loot or riot, and areas with no instability can get aid instead of waiting for the last pockets of resistance to be quelled.

Why do I care so much? Self-interest. I live in an area more likely than most to experience a terrorist-caused disaster on the scale of Katrina. After having seen government try to respond to Hugo and Katrina, I can’t count on them to help. It’s that simple. But right now government policy is to prevent people who could help to reach me. I want to remove that obstacle, and if it means relying entirely on the people who have proven they can help, so be it. I’m willing to bet my life on that. Are you sure you want to bet your life on a bunch who mandate that firefighters get sexual harassment training before they can come help?

Disasters always are disastrous–hence the name. They are marked by suffering and pain and loss. But it doesn’t have to be this bad. At the very least, fans and foes of government should unite to end the practice of blocking private charity to disaster areas. Can we at least agree on that?

Why? Because FEMA gave the residents of Charleston, South Carolina a half hour to prepare to receive a planeload of refugees (the plane trip from Louisiana to South Carolina is much longer than a half hour). Busses, ambulances, medical personnel, and relief workers managed to scramble to the airport in record time.

Then, nothing happened. They contacted FEMA, to find out that the planeload had indeed arrived in Charleston…WEST VIRGINIA.

This is right up there with Chertoff commenting on how Louisiana is a city underwater.

Charleston, South Carolina has good reason to already loathe FEMA, as they were useless in 1989 for hurricane Hugo, crowding out real first-responders and then offering to mail checks in a few months or so.

So FEMA: useless yesterday, useless today, useless tomorrow. Let’s just ditch it, and give any funds left over to standardizing the National Guard so groups of states can coordinate security after a disaster and let the Red Cross and other charities handle emergency relief and evacuation. So far, they have consistently done a better job.

Radley Balko has an even more exhaustive list of government failures in the run up to hurricane Katrina.

Update 9/3/05: Today he has even more, and even more depressing, enumerations of the failure, including a link to a picture of all the school buses the city of New Orleans could have used to evacuate the Superdome on Monday or to evacuate the poor before going to the Superdome on Sunday.

I’d post all the ways that government failed New Orleans and Louisiana and Mississippi, but this post on Sploid does so quite well and points out the key insight: the consept of “Homeland Security” over “Civil Defense” has been an unmitigated failure.

Instead of trying to catch every perp who might want to bomb us, we could have prepared for city-destroying-level disasters, hardened the targets, and enabled more robust responses instead of giving privacy-destroying toys to every podunk sherrif’s department in the country who wanted to spy on and beat up blacks, gays, and pot smokers.

The only thing sploid doesn’t cover is the fact that local government in New Orleans and Louisiana could have been prioritizing levees and disaster planning even if the federal government wasn’t there with funds. They could have ignored the federal government’s failure to act in the aftermath. They could have planned for evacuuating the superdome immediately after the storm or getting supplies to it.

Sometimes, you have to steal a bus to survive. Many municipalities have these things. But this young person DID NOT HAVE ZE CORREKT PAPERS! So,

“I just took the bus and drove all the way here…seven hours straight,’ Gibson admitted. “I hadn’t ever drove a bus.”

The teen packed it full of complete strangers and drove to Houston. He beat thousands of evacuees slated to arrive there.

[…]

Authorities eventually allowed the renegade passengers inside the dome. But the 18-year-old who ensured their safety could find himself in a world of trouble for stealing the school bus.

Maybe it is America’s shame that we’ve accepted authorities who make no distinction between survival in a disaster zone and looting…and are embarrassingly upstaged by a young man with fewer degrees in public administration who nonetheless figured out that school busses work just as well as coaches, whether they’re “authorized” or not.

I agree there’s been some racism in the response to hurricane Katrina. Hell, most of New Orleans is the result of racism in its various forms. But some black Congress members got up to talk about the issue today, and one lady I saw (didn’t catch her name) went way the hell too far:

“This is America’s shame.”

No, it’s you in government’s shame. By participating, you’re a part of it, lady. This has been a government failure of massive proportions, decades in the making and made acute by current inaction. But America is not its government, and quite frankly, we responded faster than you did, lady. We were there first, and likely we’ll be there after. It’s not our shame, it’s your shame, and you should either direct your criticism at your fellow Members, or you should apologize for the continual failings of them in preventing or dealing with this crisis.

…a card-carrying member of the ACLU?

Well, after they got off their butts and finally mailed it to me, yes, I am.

I’d been threatening to for a few years. What finally caused me to pull the trigger? Well, it pisses off too many people I want to see pissed off, but Radley Balko’s post on how it would piss off Bill O’Reilly pushed me over the edge. I don’t think O’Reilly is the worst enemy of freedom in America, but he’ll do.

It’s time to be more active in fighting back against the loonies of left and right who are tripping over themselves to give up personal freedom to assuage fears that economic, spiritual, or physical harm will come to them. The ACLU does a fairly good job against the loonies of the right–and the loons are on the march. I thought we were in a war against theocracies. It’s no good becoming more of one ourselves. And I’m tired of trying to figure out whether the PATRIOT Act would have been more at home in early 1920s Russia or early 1930s Germany.

Of course, the loonies of the left are not exactly quiescent, either, so I simultaneously gave to the Institute for Justice. There’s no debate about the state of corporatism in America: it looks like 1920s Italy. There is simply no stopping any level of government from taking your property and giving it to a corporation, so long as they say they think it’ll be better somehow that way. Governments use eminent domain and licensing scams to prevent people of the wrong color from occupying primo real estate or getting into nice retail locations or competing with white businesses.

You need all of them: you need the freedom to pray or not as you like, without the government making you subsidize somebody else; you need the freedom to say what you like without being thrown in jail; you need the freedom for your case to be heard if you are; you need the freedom to own a place and not be thrown out the second a higher bidder comes along; and you need the freedom to buy a drink from whomever you please, whether it pleases a giant alcohol distributer or not.

You the freedom to be yourself; else freedom from jail doesn’t mean a lot.

How do I know?

There’s a piece in today’s Washington Post (I won’t bother linking because it will disappear behind a paywall) reveling in the woes of local transportation planners because gas tax revenue is down. Why is it down despite prices being up?

Virginia last increased its tax, to 17.5 cents per gallon, in 1987, and the District and Maryland haven’t raised their tax rates since 1992. Maryland charges 23.5 cents a gallon; the District’s tax is 20 cents a gallon.

The federal government tacks on an 18.4-cent gas tax, which pays for much of its contribution to transportation projects. State officials said the amount they receive from the federal government could shrink if drivers look to conserve gas.

That’s right, these are like poll taxes or fees–they are a fixed amount per gallon, not a percentage of the price. So if I buy premium gas, a lower percentage of my gas bill is taxes. So when people buy less gas, they get less money. How do I know people are actually conserving gas?

State officials said that effect is starting to be felt. In June and July, when prices started jumping and drivers started changing habits, total gas tax receipts dropped by nearly $1 million in Virginia compared with the same months last year.

The same was true in the District, where gas tax revenue dropped sharply in June, to a level nearly $1 million less than last year. June also was disappointing in Maryland, where taxes came in $1 million less than projected. Numbers for July from the District and Maryland were not yet available.

So price goes up, consumption goes down. According to peak oilers, this happens for every commodity except oil.

Of course, this should be a good thing for regulators, right? They have less use of the roads, requiring less maintenance and less expansion. Pollution goes down, transit receipts go up, everybody wins, right?

Oh, wait, I forgot. Taxes are an end in and of themselves, not a tool to achieve a public good:

“If trends continue in terms of gas tax receipts, we’ll be broke in several years,” said Dan Tangherlini, the District’s director of transportation. “We’ll be in a position where we have to lay off administrative staff or we wouldn’t be able to match federal highway funds.”

Egads, not lay off administrative staff! Raising taxes is the only way to go, I guess. Since people are paying more for gas, they should pay…more…for gas…or something.

But the point is, there is hard evidence that prices influence behavior. The SUV was produced by pandering policies plummeting the price of petroleum.

A further note: I also read a piece in Scientific American (already behind a paywall) that pointed out the US economy grew 21% from the late Seventies to the mid Eighties, but oil usage declined 17%. So there is precedent for this kind of contraction. Yep, there was a bad recession through part of that period, but not even the majority of it.

Bottom line: High gas prices cause people to conserve. Capping the price will increase demand and cause shortages. Hawaii, you forgot to read your history books, didn’t you?

First, a little history.

On May 12, 2004, I wrote about why I’m not worried about Indian programmers takin’ mah jahrb! (BTW, that was South Park’s episode tonight.)

However, there’s no such thing as central air there, except for large companies and hotels. Rooms are cooled by individual air conditioners, largely because the infrastructure for building houses that can be fitted with central air and the components of central air systems themselves just aren’t there. Several other services Americans take for granted, such as reliable electricity, always-on hot water, and good sewer systems are by no means guaranteed, even to comparably rich families.

Then, a little over a year later, on June 14, 2005, I presented a problem for those who believe globalization is a race to the bottom. A commenter took me to task:

Global Free Trade isn’t an absolute race to the bottom. It’s a game of last man standing. As more and more poeple get sucked into poverty, the few at the top begin to bloat. Protectionism comes back into play when they feel the pinch themselves.

Oh yeah?

“Four years ago, a typical call center employee would have earned between 5,000 to 6,000 rupees ($114- $136) a month. Now it may be up to between 7,000 to 9,000 rupees ($159 – $204) a month,” he said.

And as to the first point about infrastructure:

Unless India devises a long-term roadmap to improve infrastructure and consistently grow its skilled labor force, he said India will see some of its offshore BPO clients shift business elsewhere.

“Although India’s infrastructure is improving, it is not keeping pace with the rapid growth of the industry,” the report said.

Yeah, free-marketers are Pollyanna-ish dreamers whose ideas will never come to pass, because the magic market will never lift incomes. And stupid Google keeps raising the salary levels of tech types here.

Yeah, yeah, hand-wave renders it irrelevant and I’m not looking at the real world, because {god has spoken and the world will end soon|that won’t help politicians make everybody live like yuppies here and quaint savages there}.