Tom's Turn: Notes from our Senior Editor

Government Ain't All Bad

September 15, 2005

It would be enormously satisfying to be able to blame the Bush administration for the damage inflicted by Katrina, but that wouldn't be fair. We can, and do, blame the administration for inexcusable failures in responding rapidly and adequately to the catastrophe and making the suffering far worse than it had to be.

In the longer term, as has been pointed out in many places, the failure to protect the natural wetlands of the Gulf coast, particularly in Louisiana, made the damage far more severe than it would otherwise have been. Blame for that goes back decades. The pollution that now engulfs the region is a stern reminder that our present lifestyle depends on a huge variety of very dangerous substances.

What I'd like to muse about briefly here, however, is a more abstract matter: the proper role of government in our lives.

Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, has famously been quoted as saying, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." That pretty well sums up the philosophy of this administration and an unfortunately large fraction of Congress.

But government exists for perfectly good reasons. We need police. We need firefighters. Only the very wealthiest can hire private protectors. By the same token, we need government to protect the environment. Without strong oversight and enforcement of powerful laws -- by citizens as well as by agencies -- the free market, or any kind of economic organization, would poison air and water, raze forests, strip hillsides, fill valleys with rubble and trash, and, yes, allow wetlands to be degraded to the point where their storm-buffering capacity is ruined.

The linguist George Lakoff has pointed out that this is a fundamental difference of political philosophy between what he calls "progressive/liberals" and "right-wing conservatives." He makes a lot of sense.

Now I can get as frustrated as anyone with bureaucracies that don't work, or are unfair, or are too big for their britches. But this anti-government madness has gone way too far. Maybe some day, long hence, we will be able to say that, for all the damage she did, Katrina knocked some sense into our thick heads.

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org