---

I Bet You'd Call the Fire Department, Mr. Libertarian!
By now you've probably seen at least one instance of this spate of tiresome ruminations on how the hurricane is some sort of ultimate gotcha to deploy against the idea of small government.

This is all profoundly stupid. There is no deep overarching ideological point here, because for pretty much everyone short of the anarchists, preventing the collapse of civilization into a huge Hobbesian clusterfuck makes the list—whether yours is short or long—of things governments are supposed to do—state governments when feasible (assuming adequate preparation on the ground is better than airlifts later), federal government when it isn't. So yes, Socrates, you've got me. The issue here really doesn't seem to have been some dire funds shortage—in principle, all the preparation we've supposedly been doing for terror attacks should've put us in position to do a much better job of this. The real problem here sure looks like nothing more or less than a staggering display of ineptitude, which as the anti-matter doppelganger of mom, apple pie, and puppies, is pretty easy to oppose across ideological lines. By all means, let's hold officials at all levels accountable for how this has gone down, but spare us the pretended insights into the merits of mohair subsidies we're supposed to draw from all this.