Break In The Clouds

From IBD:
Posted 5/31/2006

Culture: Officials in storm-prone states are telling residents they need to depend more on themselves and less on the government when hurricanes strike. Are lambs lying down with lions as well?

When governments begin preaching a message of self-reliance, better start looking for other signs of apocalypse. This stuff just doesn't happen.

Yet there they are, through public service announcements, awareness campaigns and other methods, telling people that unless they're old, poor or can't get around, the government won't be there to hold their hands when the winds blow and waters rise.

"Get A Plan," the Florida Division of Emergency Management is urging residents "who have the means and ability to be prepared in the event of a major storm, but are not." "Stay Alert, Stay Alive," is the message Mississippi is sending out.

But it'll take a sledgehammer, as Florida emergency management director Craig Fugate put it last week, to drive home the point because governments and politicians have for so long preached the message of government dependence. People simply have been conditioned to think of government as nanny and sugar daddy, a fallback position for some, a caregiver of first resort for others.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, drug benefits, aid for the poor, housing assistance, government-backed student loans, subsidized child care, job programs — did we leave anything out?

Of course we did. There's almost no end to the addictive entitlements, many of them sucked up at the middle-class level and above, peddled by policymakers and bureaucrats.

Widespread dependence on these programs is, as Peter Kirsanow of the National Labor Relations Board put it some years ago, the "antithesis of liberty."

Some might be surprised, but the founders didn't plan for dependency as a birthright. They envisioned and laid a solid foundation for a grand republic where individuals made or lost their own way, and were free of coercion and "help" from the government.

Bill Clinton famously promised more than a decade ago that the era of big government was over. How we wish that were true. Despite his insistence, the bloated public sector remains — thanks in large part to Republicans who ought to know better.

The New York Times seems to think that the message of self-reliance coming from government officials in the hurricane zone is a scare tactic. Most of the media probably would concur.

We don't see it that way. The people to whom the message is directed are not children, as elitists think of them. They are adults capable of making their own choices but who have instead been kept afloat by government assistance.

In many ways, that's worse than being stranded by a Category 5 storm.