Government, Not Charity, Should Pay for Disaster Relief

Horrified and moved by the suffering Hurricane Katrina has caused, generous Americans have donated more than $1-billion to relief groups.

But as churches and synagogues and mosques and community groups and universities and schools run fund-raising carwash after concert after dinner after special collection, I worry that Americans are making a colossal mistake, one likely to produce more natural disasters, more scenes of devastated populations wandering aimlessly through their former neighborhoods, and even more massive relief efforts in the future.

The paltriness of the immediate response to Katrina has blinded too many people to the deeper developments that helped produce Katrina’s enormous destructive power. The destruction was magnified, and is still being magnified, by real political choices made by our elected officials: the choice to pursue pre-emptive war instead of shoring up the systems at home that protect Americans from harm; the choice to allow unbridled coastal development over preservation of wetlands; and the choice to erode pollution standards rather than control the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming.

Now add one more: the choice to rely on private, voluntary charitable giving rather than government funds, raised by taxes, to rescue, feed, and shelter the people who were displaced because of Katrina. As Americans watched the spectacular inability of “authorities” — local police, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Coast Guard, National Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, United States Army and Navy — to provide for the common defense and the common good, President Bush and his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, are asking us to dig deep into our pockets to make up the difference.

While government agencies fail, Republicans try to have it both ways: Having starved federal budgets with immense tax giveaways to the wealthy, anti-government types get to say “I told you so” when government agencies fail to perform their missions.

That is a breathtaking example of Republican political success over the past 25 years. So profoundly has political discourse shifted to the right that Bill Clinton (“The era of big government is over”) thinks nothing of going on the road to make sure government remains ineffectual.

Mr. Clinton and his fellow Democrats could contribute far more to America’s most vulnerable citizens by laying the groundwork for a more just society. They could begin with the obvious: Because this is a big country, it needs a big government. No great country can be run on the cheap. Investments in people, in infrastructure, in the environment, in research, and in the arts serve the public good. That’s why Americans pay taxes. Disaster relief and homeland security are about the public good, and government funds ought to pay for them.

But no matter what their politics, donors might want to think twice before they write checks to the Red Cross. It’s not that they shouldn’t send it. When people are bleeding, they need Band-Aids; when they’re starving, they need food. But they should also consider sending an equal amount to an environmental group that advocates for preserving wetlands, for clean energy, and against the pollution that causes global warming, or making a check out to an organization that seeks to build a tax system that is fair, not one that just benefits the wealthy.

Donors who sent checks only to a hurricane-relief group will be aiding, however unintentionally, the conservative theorist Grover Norquist’s goal for government: “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” A horrifying version of that future can be seen in New Orleans, where government is drowning in a toxic bathtub.

But donors who send the second check will be investing in a different government, one envisioned by the framers when they explained the purpose of the Constitution: “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

We owe our posterity more than Band-Aids.

Warren Goldstein, author of William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: A Holy Impatience, teaches history at the University of Hartford.