Re: Townhall.com – 3/1/2009 – “Remember the Maginot – or, don’t shoot the dog” – Paul Jacobs

Jacobs is right on about the necessary of citizen robustness and quick citizen reaction in emergencies to support the efforts of a thin veneer of professionals. It is not possible to have a standing “army” of professionals ready to respond to any problem we can (and can’t) think of. The economic cost of such an “army” is too high, the between problem inactivity too demotivating to the “army”, and the lack of the responsibility for responding to crisis by the general population makes us unable to respond to unanticipated problems.

But Jacobs is wrong in his interpretation of the “Dead Pet Dog” parable. The problem was not due to “professional” responders; volunteer responders with or without professional leadership (posse or vigilante responders) have a long history of much greater overreaction and error rate in our country than our professional police forces. Volunteer responders led by professionals are preferable to purely professional responders not because volunteers do better (they don’t) but because when professionals cannot adequately respond to all problems, they need volunteer support for the things that they are insufficiently staffed to do. In the Dead Pet Dog incident, volunteers were not necessary and their presence would probably have made matters even worse.

Placing our trust is government is beneficial, so long as (1) we put our trust in government to do only what government should be doing, and (2) we insure thru the general practice of democracy that our government is competent at doing what it is supposed to do. There are limits to what government should do, and these limits reflect what volunteers cannot (or more to the point, do not) successfully do.

What FEMA was supposed to do during Katrina --- make federal resources available to local responders and provide coordination among local responder organizations, including local governments --- was right on. But what FEMA actually did do failed to justify our trust in their competency to do their job. We should continue to recognize government’s FEMA mandate but we should take steps to insure that FEMA is actually prepared to do its job. It is unfair and inaccurate to blame FEMA’s Katrina failure on anything other than that it’s managers being chosen by political and personal relationships instead of professional emergency response management competence, and as such neither understood what could/should have been done in preparation for a Katrina-like event, or (apparently) even what could/should have been done once a Katrina-like event occurred.

Re: Townhall.com – 12/10/2008 – “The Big Government Light Brigade” – Terence Jeffrey

Sticking to principle is virtuous when and only when the principle you stick to is a clearly defined principle worth sticking to.

The problem with the “small government” as a principle is that “small” is undefined, perhaps indefinable.

The smallest possible government is no government at all. No law. No national defense. No protection from your neighbor taking or using your property without your consent. It would be a “might makes right” world. The biggest possible government is an all pervasive government that can and does do everything. No private property, just restricted government granted permits to use property. No inalienable rights, just government granted rights. It would be a strictly regulated micromanaged world. There is a huge range of sizes between the smallest government and the largest government. Any government between the two extremes is bigger than the smallest and small than the biggest and in someone’s eyes is too big and in someone else’s eyes is too small.

In reality, many of those screaming for smaller government thru eliminating the social umbrella or business and environmental regulation want more government in some areas, for example, in national defense or morality enforcement. Of course, others want to increase government intervention into social, business, and environmental issues while expending less energy in national defense or interfering with issues of personal behavior.

It is my opinion, the only reasonable “principle” governing the size of government is “no government should be any larger or any smaller than is required to accomplish the goals for which that government was instituted among men”. In my opinion, “big government” is not a principle but a derogatory mantra of those who wish to reduce some specific area of government intervention while “small government” is a complementary mantra of those who wish to reduce some specific area of government intervention.