Katrina Corruption

I spotted this article while searching for some other materials and I thought I'd stop to say two words about it.

Firstly, is anyone even remotely surprised by this? Has there ever been a case of a government handing out piles of money without corruption? Of course not. It is precisely this kind of government largesse that causes corruption in the first place. There is no incentive to be responsible with taxpayers' money. If it all gets frittered away uselessly, jack up taxes! There's plenty more where that came from!

If any government agency actually succeeds in solving the problem they were hired to solve, all that happens is that they put themselves out of a job. Successive years of evidence should demonstrate that many civil servants aren't in the business serving taxpayers; they're in the business of holding down a job. It's difficult enough to get people to admit that such thing as long-term self-interest exists (not to mention that many people believe that worrying enough about your self-interest to identifyit is wrong), there's no use in expecting someone that would work for FEMA or other similar agencies to intentionally put themselves out of work.

Secondly, you cannot prevent corruption by assigning people to watch and make sure no corruption takes place. Why? Because anyone with so ridiculously thankless a job as that is the first person to start accepting bribes and playing favorites all over the place.

The solution is voluntary charity, not throwing yet more billions of tax dollars into what amounts to a black hole. There is a strictly limited amount of charity, and when it's gone, it's gone. That at least provides some incentive to reign in costs or at least consider them in some fashion, and the donors are not being held up at gunpoint if the idea of some money getting to people they would by no means support doesn't appeal to them.

I'm getting mighty tired of this bread and circuses business. The bread is taken from me, and the circuses never were entertaining. Time to dig out the wooden stake and put the vampire to rest.