Some residents were quoted in the local paper complaining about FEMA 's response —it had been only been a couple days since the summer storm roared through the State, and yet there are already complaints that the response has not been fast enough. Undoubtedly the local and national media will use this as yet another example of how underfunded government is.
This begs the question: can government be asked or expected to protect each and every one of us against each and every potential disaster?
With the Katrina disaster, the fact was that New Orleans was a city built in a Hurricane-prone area, built below sea level, and someday a disaster was bound to strike someday. Many of the preparations for that disaster were made decades ago, and they were never going to be adequate to the task should the disaster strike, as it did in 2005. Yet it became fodder for political finger pointing within days.
In some ways the Minnesota bridge collapse bears the same hallmarks: the bridge was built decades ago, with a design that would never pass muster today. Extremely competent engineers made the choices that seemed best to maintain safety, were spending millions to upgrade the bridge, and yet an unexpected failure occurred. Nobody yet knows why, whatever speculation gets published in the papers every day. People of good will were doing their best, and spending millions of dollars, to keep the bridge safe.
And the floods that left so many homeless here in Minnesota—along with at least 6 fatalities—were simply an act of nature that occurs here frequently. Tornados and violent storms are the norm, not the exception in the wide plains and prairies of Minnesota and much of the United States, as Hurricanes are for the Eastern seaboard.
The new and bizarre assumption—that government should or could be Omni-competent in preventing or insuring against the risks of life is disturbing. It is right to ask that government do its best to provide public safety, ensure public health, and build and keep up the infrastructure it is responsible for. But it simply cannot ensure that nothing will ever go wrong, or be able to fix whatever bad things happen within days.
Government is not a benevolent mommy or daddy which can make everything better when it hurts. It is an imperfect tool we use to ensure, as the Founders put it, that we can all participate in the pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness.” We ask it to provide public goods, but the tools it has—bureaucracies and money—will never do a great job providing what we are asking it to do.
No amount of money, no number of great and powerful bureaucracies, and no amount of planning will be able to thwart the ability of nature and fortune to overcome our best laid plans and preparations. And it will certainly never be able to eradicate the risks of living in a chaotic and sometimes violent world.
Yet despite this fact, I expect that soon enough the act of Nature that created the flash floods that have left hundreds or thousands homeless will be used to assign blame, and as another tool in the unending battle for political power.
As long as some people believe that government can solve any problem with enough money, every tragedy, act of Nature, or error in judgment made recently or decades ago will be turned into political fodder within days, or even hours.