If Government Is Effective, Intelligent People Will Rely on Government

To: John Tierney
Re: Magic Marker Strategy

You fail to carry your column to its logical conclusion. The man responsible for the disaster in New Orleans is James Lee Witt. By running FEMA effectively, he made local leaders believe they could rely on it.

P.S.
You also:

1) Fail to separate questions of policy from those of execution. Advocating the elimination of the federal role in natural disaster response does not excuse a failure to fulfill the current mandate, and to properly apply federal resources already paid for by tax dollars.

2) Fail to acknowledge the enormous reduplication of resources that would be necessary for each locality to prepare, separately, for an event of a scale that is likely to occur in the entire nation only once a century.

3) Fail to verify the claims of the local officials you cite as exemplary, or to compare the challenge of evacuating the residents of Newport News to evacuating those of New Orleans.

P.P.S.
Your previous column was excellent. I hope flood insurance is privatized. The strategy wouldn't be practical in the Netherlands, but America has enough high ground for people to move to it if the actuaries veto their current locales.