Back in 2001, refugees from the war in Afghanistan were dying of starvation while aid workers were completing paperwork before distributing food to them. During the tsunami in Southeast Asia this year, supplies of food, medicine and other necessities from abroad piled up at airports.

 In both emergency times and normal times, governments have different incentives than private businesses. More fundamentally, human beings will usually do more for their own benefit than for the benefit of others. The desire to make money usually gets people in gear faster than the desire to help others.

 This is not true of everybody. Virtually nothing is true of everybody. We rightly honor those who do their utmost to help others, in part because not everyone acts that way.

 It would undoubtedly be a better world if we all loved our neighbors as we love ourselves and acted accordingly.

 But in the real world that we actually live in, the question is what set of incentives has the better track record for getting the job done -- and especially getting the job done promptly when time can be the difference between life and death.

 The country does not have one dime more resources available when those resources are channeled through government. The resources are just handled less effectively by government and dispensed in an indiscriminate way that encourages people to continue locating in the known path of predictable disasters.