The Nanny State Fails the Sandy Test

What's wrong with bloated, morbidly obese government?  As if the expense and violation of basic rights wasn't bad enough, it turns out that big government doesn't do it's job.  Take New York City, for example.

With an almost eerie foreshadowing, the dangers laid out by scientists as they tried to press public officials for change in recent years describes what happened this week: Subway tunnels filled with water, just as they warned. Tens of thousands of people in Manhattan lost power. The city shut down. . . .

“A fair question to ask is, have we been as focused as we need to be for emergency preparations,” said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize ties to the administration. “We’ve just been lucky. We need hardening for the risk we’ve always faced. Until things happen, people aren’t willing to pay for it.”

Government has important, limited, legitimate functions in society.  Infrastructure is one of them.  So, why didn't New York City build the infrastructure that could have prevented the destruction caused by Super Storm Sandy? 

Here in New York we have a very busy government. It’s worried about the kinds of fats we eat and the size of the soft drinks we buy, and there is no shortage of regulations affecting businesses, street vendors, and individuals. But in all this exciting fine tuning, nobody seems to have bothered to think about the much greater task of keeping floodwaters out of the subway system. Admittedly, getting public support and finding the money for flood protection would be hard, but it is exactly that kind of hard job that governments are supposed to do. Leadership is getting the important things done, not looking busy on secondary tasks while the real needs of the city go quietly unmet.

Every law, every regulation, every tax requires enforcement, and that requires resources.  When government gets busy regulating every aspect of people's lives, there are no resources left to do what it's supposed to do.  The result is what's happening now at Staten Island.

Even as the city and feds rushed food, water and generators to the borough, residents and their elected officials fumed that Staten Island was being prepped as the starting line for Sunday's New York City Marathon, even as the rest of the island is left to deal with the aftershocks of the mega-storm.

"The notion of diverting even one police officer, one first responder, one asset away from this carnage is beyond irrational,” Councilman James Oddo told the Daily News. Earlier, Oddo called the idea of hosting the marathon as “idiotic” on his Facebook page.

Obviously, NYC's government has its priorities backwards.  But that shouldn't come as a surprise.  That's what happens when government tries to do too much.

UPDATE (04NOV12): The inimitable Mark Steyn puts is far better than I ever could.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/

Even in those few parts of the Northeast that can legitimately claim to have been clobbered by Sandy, Big Government made it worse. Last week, Nanny Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, rivaled his own personal best for worst mayoral performance since that snowstorm a couple of years back. This is a man who spends his days micromanaging the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system – just as, in the previous crisis, the municipal titan who can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger proved utterly incapable of regulating any salt on to Sixth Avenue. Imagine if this preening buffoon had expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages. But that's leadership 21^st-century style: When the going gets tough, the tough ban trans fats.

Then he relates it to our federal government's inaction in Benghazi.

Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats' calls for help – even though he had aircraft and Special Forces in the region. Too bad. He's all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America's uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandoes? In Iraq, al-Qaida is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world's biggest "counterterrorism" bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.

However, even within big government, common sense sometimes wins.  Mayor Nanny Bloomberg finally canceled he NYC Marathon.  But he failed to even get that right.

Fresh off his flight from San Francisco Friday afternoon, Leland Kim had just picked up his numbered marathon bib and registration packet at the Javits Center and was headed to the ING New York City Marathon Expo.

Then he got a text message from a friend: "We're so sorry the marathon got canceled."

Confused, Kim asked someone working at the expo about it, and was told the marathon was still going on. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been saying so all week. And Kim had already spoken to runners who'd come from New Zealand, Argentina, Russia and Ireland.