Letter to the Editor Time

Today I do my best Don Boudreaux imitation.  Below is a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to this Paul Krugman horror show column from Monday.

September 3, 2008

Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
 
To the Editor:

In his September 1 column (“John, Don’t Go"), Paul Krugman blames the failed response of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina on the Bush Administration’s antipathy to government. To the contrary, FEMA’s failures resulted from two problems endemic to bureaucracies no matter the party in power:  a lack of local knowledge and weaker incentives than the private sector to succeed.  By contrast, Wal-Mart got supplies and people into the worst-hit areas because its associates and managers had detailed knowledge of their communities and the incentive to help their neighbors that will always be absent in bureaucracies.  FEMA’s warehouses of unused resources contrasted with Wal-Mart’s trucks on the move suggest that indeed the failures of Katrina were ones of bureaucratic ignorance, not administration ideology.

Sincerely,
 

Steven Horwitz

Comments

[Jason Briggeman]

Wal-Mart has incentive to help its customers, but a government has none to help its taxpayers?!

[Roger Koppl]

Jason, I'm not sure which emoticon should go with your post. Anyway, I think your statement is about right, due consideration being made for its brevity. There are some incentives, but they are relatively weak, and so on. Katrina, on which Steve is an expert, seems to be a good example. The Republicans may well get a another crack at President in spite of the failures of FEMA. As I understand, mayor Nagin's office was guilty of some pretty bad mismanagement and yet he was reelected. (See the Wikipedia article on Nagin.) So evidence seems to favor the view that democratically elected governments generally have inadequate incentives to help the electorate.

[Jason Briggeman]

I'm sorry I omitted the emoticon :)

It just frustrates me to read of "the incentive to help their neighbors that will always be absent in bureaucracies." (With regard to a lot of services that are not bottled-water delivery, it is rather obvious that adequate incentives exist.) This sort of over-the-top flourish makes the letter easy to dismiss. As they rightly teach in grade school: when you see "always" in the question, the answer is almost certainly "false".

[Steve Horwitz]

Well letters to the editor are hardly academic journal articles or even policy studies. They are *supposed* to be full of rhetorical flourishes. I'm sure it won't get published anyway, but one might as well go out with guns blazing.