Relief effort has racial element?

[Adrian II]

Adrian I really don't see how this has anything to do with big government versus small government. It has everything to with bad government however.

Exactly. I never pleaded for big government in the first place. And doubling the size of a bad government is probably not going to make it much better (or worse, for that matter).

What is essential is peoples' notion of the nature and extent of the common good that a government is supposed to safeguard and enhance. If this notion is minimalist, the end result is a minimal government (a government that leaves children behind, so to speak).

[KukriKhan]

In one of these threads, someone asked, what was the free market solution to rebuilding NO. By a curious coincidence, (the Org asks, the BBC answers)...

- English Assassin

Yeah, that keeps happening. Adrian II, in Post #34 in this thread trots out the Louisiana State Emergency Action Plan, quoting the relevant evacuation bits. 3 hours later, Bryan Jennings, anchorman for NBC News, uses the same document and references the same entries in his analysis of "what (might have) went wrong". Eerie.

Meanwhile, in an obviously clerical error that would be comedic, where lives not at stake: FEMA sends evac's to wrong city

[Adrian II]

Meanwhile, in an obviously clerical error that would be comedic, where lives not at stake: FEMA sends evac's to wrong city

Happens to the best of us. The Herald Trib has a decent article today (originally from the new York Times I believe) about Dutch coastal defences. What it smoothes over (for lack of space) is the total screw-up during the Dutch flooding disaster in 1953. But what it mentions is that nature is always full of surprises and rarely follows a man-made scenario.Now we have decent defenses, but it took us a while. We were the ones who invented dykes and polders, right? So we reckoned in 1953 that the nation was prepared for a major hurricane + high tide. Yeah right...