Anyone can see why many prefer the top-down to the bottom-up approach. The top-downers -- who have been with us for centuries -- have authority issues. They see nothing good as happening in society except on command. That good things bubble up from private inspirations and processes -- the stuff of the free marketplace -- is a concept at which they shake their heads fiercely. They see the marketplace as disdainful of what Sen. Kennedy calls "the American dream."
It depends no doubt on what one means by "the American dream" -- opportunity, creativity, latitude; or the artificiality and mediocrity of goals imposed by committee vote. Americans may be ambiguous about having things just one way -- they tend to endorse freedom and high social ideals -- but by and large, they dream of freedom.
The Gulf Coast reconstruction debate, to whose pilot light we have just applied a match, will involve choices many don't like making. For instance, do we restore New Orleans' old residential configuration, or do we permit the marketplace to write off areas that don't work economically?
Government, which builds levees, and the private sector, which starts and operates businesses of every sort, will both have a hand in what happens. Is there genuine doubt, even so, as to who will work faster, better, more enduringly? Doubt, I mean, outside the fenced-in vision of Massachusetts' senior senator and his friends?