Thursday, September 29, 2005

More on violence vs. cooperation. Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, perhaps testing a theme for a possible 2008 presidential run: Abraham Lincoln once said: "government should only do what citizens can not do for themselves or what citizens can not do better." Katrina and Rita prove the wisdom of that approach. Organizing mass evacuations, rescuing stranded homeowners, securing abandoned neighborhoods, financing long term and temporary housing, rebuilding public infrastructure, attending to medical needs, and avoiding future tragedies -- those are items that government must do. Individuals, non-profits, and the private sector cannot, and should not, handle them. To reiterate a theme I blogged about yesterday, the message here, stripped of pretension, is that "violence is superior to cooperation." Vilsack believes that humans cannot peacefully produce infrastructure, health care, or security, so all of these things must be provided through violence. [Mises Economics Blog] I wonder what (if anything) Vilsack was thinking when he came up with those examples? He's somehow managed to come up with a series of examples where the government failed catastrophically, and the people did very well (to the extent that they weren't stopped from helping by the government). 10:47:51 AM    comment () Jamming Aircraft Navigation Near Nuclear Power Plants. The German government want to jam aircraft navigation equipment near nuclear power plants. This certainly could help if terrorists want to fly an airplane into a nuclear power plant, but it feels like a movie-plot threat to me. On the other hand, this could make things significantly worse if an airplane flies near the nuclear power plant by accident. My guess is that the latter happens far more often than the former. [Schneier on Security] That's an idea that deserves some kind of prize for "silliest false-sense-of-security measure." Perhaps the German government is unaware of it, but around sixty years ago many thousands of pilots managed to fly all the way from Britain to precise locations in Germany without any electronics! 10:30:58 AM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 2:06:37 PM.