Something Good from Recent Disasters

One of the great fall outs of the Hurricanes in the South Eastern United States is that people are taking care of themselves and their neighbors, without government permission. That’s right! The liberal backlash is uncovering the conservative conspiracy to take responsibility, show initiative and solve problems without the government doing it all for us.

The end result of this phenomenon, we can only surmise, is that people will discover that they do not need big government and will then start voting Republican. How dare they?

In the worldview of the New Yorker, government is the natural default source of protection:

There is a cyclic pattern to the erosion of faith in government, in which politics saps the state’s capacity to protect people, and so people put their trust in other institutions (churches; self-organizing volunteer navies), and are more inclined to support anti-government politics. The stories of the storm and the navies exist on a libertarian skeleton. Through them, a particular idea of how society might be organized is coming into view.

This comment by Thomas Lifson in The American Thinker sums it up:

It is evidently a bad thing that people put their trust in churches and the volunteer enterprises like the Cajun Navy, because they sap resources and trust that naturally belongs to The State.  It doesn’t sound as though Mr. Wallace-Wells or his editors are very fond of that “particular idea of society” in which autonomous citizens make their own decisions and take care of themselves without state intervention in their lives.  It’s the “Libertarian Skeleton,” and it’s here in time for Halloween.

We never understand how far we have fallen until we arrive at the bottom. Hopefully, we can now start our return to the top!