Katrina break down
Which of the three perspectives do you find most persuasive?
Least persuasive?
Setting aside the philosophical and legal issues this case raises, what are the management or efficiency arguments for and against a more centralized response to large national disasters like Hurricane Katrina?
Why would we not want to have a federal fire department?
If the federal government tells the states and cities they will receive no assistance in the event of a disaster, what do you think will happen? personal responsibility and neighborly concern is a superior substitute for government intervention.”
Clearly, Landy conceptualizes federalism as being composed of four dimensions: three levels of government and the civic realm. With regard to the latter, it’s worth recalling that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized in the early nineteenth century that “government can’t match the energy and resourcefulness of citizen cooperating informally or through voluntary associations.”
Landy finds the direst examples of civic failure in the city of New Orleans, and an especially edifying example of its success in Mississippi. Landy does not sugarcoat the former:
The impression given by the media was that those who did not get out of New Orleans could not, either because they had no car or were disabled. This impression stuck even though the visuals accompanying those media reports showed streets crowded with abandoned cars. A congressional report confirmed that the pictures were more reliable than the words. It stated that more than
250,000 cars remained in the city during the storm and the cars were found parked in the driveways of many of the dead. The report chastised the governor of Louisiana, and the mayor of New Orleans for being slow to issue mandatory evacuation orders, and those individuals “share the blame” for incomplete evacuation. Resorting to the verb “share” shows just how reluctant the report writers were to concede
Least persuasive?
Setting aside the philosophical and legal issues this case raises, what are the management or efficiency arguments for and against a more centralized response to large national disasters like Hurricane Katrina?
Why would we not want to have a federal fire department?
If the federal government tells the states and cities they will receive no assistance in the event of a disaster, what do you think will happen? personal responsibility and neighborly concern is a superior substitute for government intervention.”
Clearly, Landy conceptualizes federalism as being composed of four dimensions: three levels of government and the civic realm. With regard to the latter, it’s worth recalling that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized in the early nineteenth century that “government can’t match the energy and resourcefulness of citizen cooperating informally or through voluntary associations.”
Landy finds the direst examples of civic failure in the city of New Orleans, and an especially edifying example of its success in Mississippi. Landy does not sugarcoat the former:
The impression given by the media was that those who did not get out of New Orleans could not, either because they had no car or were disabled. This impression stuck even though the visuals accompanying those media reports showed streets crowded with abandoned cars. A congressional report confirmed that the pictures were more reliable than the words. It stated that more than
250,000 cars remained in the city during the storm and the cars were found parked in the driveways of many of the dead. The report chastised the governor of Louisiana, and the mayor of New Orleans for being slow to issue mandatory evacuation orders, and those individuals “share the blame” for incomplete evacuation. Resorting to the verb “share” shows just how reluctant the report writers were to concede
References: Marc Landy, “Mega-Disasters and Federalism,” Public Administration Review (December 2008): of Legal Commentary (Spring 2007); Martha Derthick, “Where Federalism Didn’t Fail,” Public Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); and Response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (Washington, DC: GPO, February 1, 2006); Christopher Swope and Zach Patton, “In Disaster’s Wake,” Governing (November 2005); “Four Places Where the System Broke Down,” Time (September 19, 2005); “How Bush Blew It,” Newsweek (September 19, 2005); David Brown, “Live by the Rules, Die by the Rules,” Washington Post National Edition (October 9, 2005); Spencer S