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FEMA Should Be Shut Down
...Let's face it: If Michael Brown wasn't a political appointee and operated instead in the private sector, Congress would be going after him with criminal charges like he was Ken Lay.

But such a comparison is not fair to the former Enron chief. After all, Lay had enough of a clue to resign and find legal representation. Brown has not resigned, but he was taken off New Orleans duty under pressure for oddities in his resume. What's more,the agency itself will likely face no repercussions; in fact its budget will likely be increased. (I have called this tendency for failure to lead to expansion Westley's Law.) Most everyone knows this. Even in New Orleans, when a major storm threatened to test the publicly-managed levees, over 80 percent of the population decided to get out when it had the chance.

The comparison of Enron to FEMA does have its limits. Enron, after all, was effectively abolished by market forces. But since FEMA operates outside the market, and indeed exists because of government's legal monopoly on the use of force, it lives to waste and redistribute and expand for another day....

...For a small glimpse of how the private sector can respond to tragedies such as those occurring along the Gulf Coast, you only need to look as far as Wal-Mart, which has been showing that it is about more than low prices and economies of scale. The firm, hated by the Left for helping to bring autonomy to low-income individuals, had 45 trucks loaded and ready for delivery in its Brookhaven, Mississippi, distribution center and secured a special line at a nearby gas station to ensure that its employees could make it to work before Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

After the storm, while FEMA's Brown was shooting memos, Wal-Mart offered $20 million in cash donations, 1,500 truckloads of free merchandise, food for 100,000 meals and the promise of a job for every one of its displaced workers. According to the Washington Post, the firm "turned the chain into an unexpected lifeline for much of the Southeast and earned it near-universal praise at a time when the company is struggling to burnish its image."

This is simply good business, and Wal-Mart is far from the only overtaxed firm trying to provide it along the Gulf Coast, reflecting the naturally cooperative relationship between producers and consumers.

On NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Aaron F. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in the New Orleans suburbs, told host Tim Russert that if "the American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis." He's not the only one who glimpsed what might have been if there were no such thing as FEMA in the first place.