New York Times
August 30, 2005
Irreplaceable Exuberance
By HENRY BLODGET

TEN years ago this month, the initial public offering of the Internet pioneer Netscape set off a dot-com boom that today is usually viewed as a sort of financial kindergarten recess, a regrettable free-for-all of idiocy and greed. Although this view does capture an aspect of the period - the arrogance and punch-drunk frivolity that come with easy money - it misses the big picture. It also implies that had we only been smarter and more disciplined in the late 1990's, we could have spared ourselves the pain and embarrassment that followed. History suggests otherwise.

The growth of the Internet has paralleled that of most industries based on revolutionary technology. Canals, railroads, telegraphs, telephones, cars, radios, personal computers - all progressed (or are progressing) through four phases of development: boom, bust, mature growth and decay.

During the boom phase, the success of a few visionary companies like Netscape inspires frantic experimentation and speculation, as entrepreneurs and investors try to cash in on the trend. Early entrants usually enjoy temporary success, but the number of competitors soon comes to exceed the initial opportunity, leading to a collapse. After the shakeout, a handful of survivors enjoy an extended period of growth and profitability. Finally, another technology shift leads to an era of decline, and giants often find themselves reduced to the stature of today's buggy-whip makers - or worse.

Sometimes, industry life cycles last a century or more (circuit-switched telephones); sometimes, only a few decades (Polaroid). But the repetition of the pattern - as well as its resemblance to biological evolution - suggests that the boom-and-bust phases should be viewed as far more than repeated examples of human folly. Rather, they should be seen as natural, inevitable bursts of trial-and-error adaptation, the mechanisms through which industries are formed.

A precursor to the Internet boom and bust, for example, was the personal-computer bubble of the early 1980's. The Netscape of that era was Apple Computer, which went public amid the same sort of pandemonium that surrounded Netscape's I.P.O. 15 years later. "Most of them don't know anything about the company," a besieged stockbroker told Forbes magazine in 1980, describing his clients' desperate efforts to get in on the Apple offering. "They're buying it for themselves. They want to buy it for their mother or grandmother. They heard about it at a cocktail party. They don't know what the price will be but they want 500 or 1,000 shares."

Like Netscape, Apple came in an era of first-day "pops" in stock prices, instant paper millionaires and bull-market optimism. Lotus, Compaq and other companies followed, along with Seequa, Kaypro, VisiCorp, Altos, Gavilan, Victor and others. An ecosystem of supporting companies sprang up - distributors, retailers, trade-show producers, investment banks, law firms and public relations consultants - and the press reveled in rags-to-riches stories. The day Eagle Computer went public, the company's 40-year old president killed himself (and critically injured a yacht salesman who was his passenger) when he crashed his Ferrari.

By late 1984, it was over. The stocks had tanked, former moon-shots had gone bankrupt, and thousands of people lost their jobs. Projections of perpetual fantastic annual growth had been hastily revised, and humbled survivors were preparing for a bleaker future. Eventually, however, as with the Internet, the personal-computer industry proved larger and more profitable than even early boosters had predicted. And some of the biggest winners were those that went public after the shakeout - Microsoft in 1986, Dell in 1988.

If the boom-and-bust pattern is so common, the obvious question is: why don't we learn the lessons of history? Why do we overpay for thousands of doomed upstarts (Netscape, eToys, Webvan) and underpay for future giants (Microsoft, Google, eBay)? Why do so many investors plunge headlong into the fray, only to later lose their shirts? The answer, in part, is that stock prices and strategic decisions are based on predictions, and predicting the future in an industry's early days is hard.

Early in the Internet boom, for example, many thought the Web would be a rerun of television: users were going to watch "shows." The popular sites were going be the ones with spectacular visual effects and content, not simple search engines that posted lists of other sites. Others suspected that Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart were going to use financial might and physical infrastructure to crush Amazon.com, and that eBay would fizzle with the Beanie Baby fad.

These theories, once proved wrong, were replaced by others, often equally erroneous: Netscape would topple Microsoft, Amazon's growth would soon justify its stock price. (This was an unfortunate theory of mine - one that, along with some e-mails that caught the notice of the Securities and Exchange Commission, helped my Wall Street career go the way of eToys.) Gradually, through trial and painful error, we developed more refined ideas about what the Internet would become and why.

Today, the industry has progressed to the third phase of development, mature growth (which, happily, is usually the longest and most profitable phase of the four). Netscape itself was a casualty of the cycle, but other companies that learned from it are now posting performance that justifies the early Internet hype. A mere seven years into its existence, for example, Google is generating about half as much cash as Time Warner, a global media conglomerate with nearly a century of history and some 85,000 employees.

In the stock market, too, predicting is hard, especially when reasonable people disagree about when a bust might come and how severe it might be. If you miss a boom or sell too early, you won't feel smart; you'll feel wrong. (Just ask those who've been out of real estate in recent years.) Booms convince generations of investors that the only mistake is to sit on the sidelines, and they last long enough that it's easy to believe that it might, in fact, be "different this time." Eventually, even those who should know better often take the plunge, if only because they can no longer stand missing out.

Someday, perhaps, we will collectively get better at knowing which ideas will work and which won't, and when we should bank boom-era winnings and head for the exits. In the meantime, we must take solace in knowing that our exuberance helps build industries, however boneheaded it may later seem.

Henry Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst, writes frequently for Slate.

New York Times
August 31, 2005
Invasion of the Isolationists
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Washington

AS we mark four years since Sept. 11, 2001, one way to organize a review of what has happened in American foreign policy since that terrible day is with a question: To what extent has that policy flowed from the wellspring of American politics and culture, and to what extent has it flowed from the particularities of this president and this administration?

It is tempting to see continuity with the American character and foreign policy tradition in the Bush administration's response to 9/11, and many have done so. We have tended toward the forcefully unilateral when we have felt ourselves under duress; and we have spoken in highly idealistic cadences in such times, as well. Nevertheless, neither American political culture nor any underlying domestic pressures or constraints have determined the key decisions in American foreign policy since Sept. 11.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans would have allowed President Bush to lead them in any of several directions, and the nation was prepared to accept substantial risks and sacrifices. The Bush administration asked for no sacrifices from the average American, but after the quick fall of the Taliban it rolled the dice in a big way by moving to solve a longstanding problem only tangentially related to the threat from Al Qaeda - Iraq. In the process, it squandered the overwhelming public mandate it had received after Sept. 11. At the same time, it alienated most of its close allies, many of whom have since engaged in "soft balancing" against American influence, and stirred up anti-Americanism in the Middle East.

The Bush administration could instead have chosen to create a true alliance of democracies to fight the illiberal currents coming out of the Middle East. It could also have tightened economic sanctions and secured the return of arms inspectors to Iraq without going to war. It could have made a go at a new international regime to battle proliferation. All of these paths would have been in keeping with American foreign policy traditions. But Mr. Bush and his administration freely chose to do otherwise.

The administration's policy choices have not been restrained by domestic political concerns any more than by American foreign policy culture. Much has been made of the emergence of "red state" America, which supposedly constitutes the political base for President Bush's unilateralist foreign policy, and of the increased number of conservative Christians who supposedly shape the president's international agenda. But the extent and significance of these phenomena have been much exaggerated.

So much attention has been paid to these false determinants of administration policy that a different political dynamic has been underappreciated. Within the Republican Party, the Bush administration got support for the Iraq war from the neoconservatives (who lack a political base of their own but who provide considerable intellectual firepower) and from what Walter Russell Mead calls "Jacksonian America" - American nationalists whose instincts lead them toward a pugnacious isolationism.

Happenstance then magnified this unlikely alliance. Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the inability to prove relevant connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda left the president, by the time of his second inaugural address, justifying the war exclusively in neoconservative terms: that is, as part of an idealistic policy of political transformation of the broader Middle East. The president's Jacksonian base, which provides the bulk of the troops serving and dying in Iraq, has no natural affinity for such a policy but would not abandon the commander in chief in the middle of a war, particularly if there is clear hope of success.

This war coalition is fragile, however, and vulnerable to mishap. If Jacksonians begin to perceive the war as unwinnable or a failure, there will be little future support for an expansive foreign policy that focuses on promoting democracy. That in turn could drive the 2008 Republican presidential primaries in ways likely to affect the future of American foreign policy as a whole.

Are we failing in Iraq? That's still unclear. The United States can control the situation militarily as long as it chooses to remain there in force, but our willingness to maintain the personnel levels necessary to stay the course is limited. The all-volunteer Army was never intended to fight a prolonged insurgency, and both the Army and Marine Corps face manpower and morale problems. While public support for staying in Iraq remains stable, powerful operational reasons are likely to drive the administration to lower force levels within the next year.

With the failure to secure Sunni support for the constitution and splits within the Shiite community, it seems increasingly unlikely that a strong and cohesive Iraqi government will be in place anytime soon. Indeed, the problem now will be to prevent Iraq's constituent groups from looking to their own militias rather than to the government for protection. If the United States withdraws prematurely, Iraq will slide into greater chaos. That would set off a chain of unfortunate events that will further damage American credibility around the world and ensure that the United States remains preoccupied with the Middle East to the detriment of other important regions - Asia, for example - for years to come.

We do not know what outcome we will face in Iraq. We do know that four years after 9/11, our whole foreign policy seems destined to rise or fall on the outcome of a war only marginally related to the source of what befell us on that day. There was nothing inevitable about this. There is everything to be regretted about it.

Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is editorial board chairman of a new magazine, The American Interest.

Washington Post
Wednesday, August 31, 2005; A23
Solidarity Remembered
By Anne Applebaum

Walk down Long Market Street, past the shops selling amber beads and cavalry swords, through the medieval gates of the city of Gdansk, Poland. Cross the highway, head toward the shipyard and look up. When I did so a few days ago, I saw an enormous billboard featuring a list of cities: "Gdansk. Budapest. Prague. Berlin. Bucharest. Sofia. Kiev." The list makes it clear that the 1980 Gdansk shipyard strikes, which broke the state's monopoly of power in the Soviet bloc and created the independent Solidarity trade union, set the pattern for the democratic revolutions that rolled across Eastern Europe in 1989 and that continue to roll across the nations of the former Soviet Union today.

Walk a little farther and you'll come to the shipyard itself. To mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of Solidarity, a small exhibit has been installed. Somewhat oddly, the entrance leads through the hull of a ship, festooned with a not entirely comprehensible "multimedia" exhibit. More evocative are the black-and-white photographs. Some feature the strike leader Lech Walesa, signing the Solidarity agreement with Poland's communist leaders. Most show crowd scenes: thousands of shipyard workers praying, talking or sprawled out on the ground, passing the time during the two-week strike.

But what is most interesting about the billboard and the exhibit, along with the multiple conferences, concerts and celebrity speeches taking place in Gdansk this week, is the fact that they are happening at all. Until recently, it wasn't easy to find public displays of pride in Poland's democratic revolution. Five years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the founding of Solidarity, giant screens set up to relay celebratory speeches to the citizens of Gdansk attracted no more than 50 or 60. Far from seeing themselves as part of a peaceful revolution that stretched from Gdansk in 1980 to Kiev in 2004, most Poles associated the collapse of communism with corrupt politics and personal hardship.

This persistent pessimism has been one of the biggest surprises of political and economic reform. Back in 1980, or, indeed, 1989, no one imagined that the most difficult transition from communism to democracy would be psychological, not economic, or that the post-totalitarian moral hangover would linger 15 years past the first free elections. Even now, as economic problems are gradually solved, as once-shabby cities are rebuilt and repainted, and as Eastern Europeans join Western institutions, the perception of failure, personal and national, has remained. A survey of "happiness" recently quoted in the Economist revealed that despite their rising incomes, Poles still say they feel gloomier than they used to.

In part, this is because the adjustment to a new system itself was traumatic. Even if they make more money, people now have to work harder and longer than before. Even if standards of living are rising across the board, some people's standards of living are rising a lot faster. In the communist era, everyone seemed equal on the surface: Privileges, such as access to foreign goods and travel, were mostly invisible. When your neighbor buys a Mercedes, on the other hand, it's hard not to notice. It is also true that democracy, if you aren't used to it, isn't always a pretty sight. In Warsaw recently, a friend described to me a new TV talk show, in which (sound familiar?) participants of various political convictions all shout at each other. He rather liked it, he said, but most of his friends don't: "They think it's 'uncultured' when politicians disagree."

There were also ways in which the transition was genuinely unjust. Many of the early beneficiaries of economic change were not striking shipyard workers but their communist bosses, who converted political influence into private property and then used their money to win back political influence. A series of seemingly endless scandals over the past several years has reminded people that not everyone is in politics because they want to improve the lot of ordinary people. Because their official representatives -- the government, the cabinet ministers, the members of parliament -- hardly seemed worth admiring, many Poles didn't think much of their country either, whatever its economic growth statistics.

The festivities in Gdansk may not mark the end of this post-transition gloom, or of the resentment of politicians. But they do show that some kind of corner has been turned -- or at least that some Poles have found some blessings to count at last. To mark the anniversary, 100,000 people turned out for a pop concert on the grounds of the shipyard. Across town, dissidents from Burma to Belarus converged to discuss how they might foment their own peaceful revolutions at home. However much they disparage it, the generation that witnessed their country's transformation is finding that it's become a source of pride for their children and a symbol of hope around the world. It's been a long time coming -- take note, Iraq-watchers -- but despite themselves, Poles are starting to feel that Poland is a success.

Washington Post
Wednesday, August 31, 2005; A23
Greenspan's Humility
By David Ignatius

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has been an unusual figure in Washington because of his willingness to admit that he doesn't have all the answers. In that state of uncertainty, Greenspan developed an economic approach that he described in a farewell speech last weekend as "risk management." I wish more of our cocksure politicians and analysts shared his humility.

Washington is a city that lives on certainties. People want to score political and economic debates like a baseball game -- how many hits, how many errors, who are the heroes and who are the goats. Greenspan wouldn't play by those rules. His famous mumble wasn't always an attempt to mask his real conclusions. Often, I think, it was a way of expressing the reality that he wasn't sure yet what the answers were.

A telling example of Greenspan's agnosticism appeared in a profile last week by Edmund L. Andrews in the New York Times. He cited a comment Greenspan made in November 1999, at the height of the tech boom, to a closed meeting of the Fed: "We really do not know how this system works," Greenspan told his colleagues, according to a recently released transcript. "It's clearly new. The old models just are not working."

Knowing that he couldn't be sure of what was going on in the real economy, Greenspan opted for a pragmatic, seat-of-the-pants kind of economics. He talked to business executives. He studied odd bits of statistical data. He reread his old economics texts. He made decisions about the economy the way most of us try to make decisions about personal matters, by asking: What's the penalty if I'm wrong? How do I reduce the likelihood of a really bad event?

Sometimes that pragmatism made Greenspan cautious -- keeping interest rates higher than critics wanted because he still worried about inflationary expectations. Other times, it made him very bold, as when he pumped massive liquidity into the system after the stock market crash of October 1987; after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in September 1998; and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Through the ups and downs of his 18 years as Fed chairman, Greenspan tried to remain supple and adaptive -- and to avoid becoming locked in his own dogma. His genius, it seems to me, was that by leaning one way, then the other, he managed to achieve a series of "soft landings" for economic problems that many analysts thought would produce a crash.

Greenspan was candid (for him) in explaining his approach at last weekend's conference on monetary policy in Jackson Hole, Wyo. He noted how the economic certainties of earlier decades had dissolved: People no longer believed in the "Phillips Curve" that described a long-term trade-off between inflation and unemployment; they lost faith in controlling the money supply -- the famous "M1" and "M2."

Greenspan described the state of economic uncertainty this way in his farewell speech: "Our knowledge about many critical linkages is far from complete and, in all likelihood, will remain so." Lacking certain answers, he continued, the most valuable asset for policymakers is an economy's flexibility. "The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated disturbances."

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, explained what he had learned from Greenspan about how to be a central banker. "The key is to recognize that economics tells you how to think, not what to think. It is not a set of settled conclusions about issues."

Right now, Greenspan's critics are taking a poke at him for what they claim has been an overly expansionary monetary policy, which has created a real estate bubble that's about to burst. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman denounced Greenspan for his flip-flopping -- warning of budget deficits now when he didn't four years ago, cautioning about a housing bubble that he said a year ago would be manageable. He accused Greenspan of playing games with his changing views. But to me, that flexibility is precisely what has made Greenspan so successful. He may not always get it right the first time, but he analyzes, considers, adjusts.

I think of Greenspan as Washington's last great rationalist. At a time when people are screaming certainties and dogmas at each other, he's smart enough to admit he doesn't know all the answers. When he makes mistakes, he goes back and rethinks. He's willing to risk small problems to avoid big ones. He never puts a huge stack of chips on a bet when he's unsure of the odds. It's a prudent turn of mind that George Bush's Washington will badly miss when Greenspan retires in January.

Washington Post
Thursday, September 1, 2005; A29
The Uses of 'Activism'
By George F. Will

Debate about the role of judges in American governance is a hardy perennial, arising from the tension between one result of judicial review -- the invalidation of laws enacted by elected representatives -- and popular government. This is what the late Alexander Bickel of Yale Law School called the "countermajoritarian difficulty." But it should not be an agonizing difficulty for conservatives, who should cast a cool eye on any sentimental celebration of unchecked majorities.

Today the debate is colored by the fact that the more conservative party controls the presidency and both houses of Congress. Convinced that popular sentiment is with them, some conservatives fan the flames of resentment of judicial review, calling for judicial "restraint." They do so in the name of dogmatic majoritarianism -- the right of majorities to have their way. There are, however, impeccably conservative reasons for regarding judicial review as a valuable restraint on majorities, and hence for having high regard for some judicial activism.

The conservatives' party, the Republican Party, was born in reaction against repeal of the Missouri Compromise -- against, that is, the right, established by Congress in 1854, of Kansans to own slaves if a Kansas majority approved of that. The first Republican president was propelled to greatness by his recoil against allowing popular sovereignty to decide whether slavery should expand into particular territories.

Lincoln's greatness was inseparable from his belief that there are some things that majorities should not be permitted to do -- things that violate natural rights, the protection of which is the Constitution's principal purpose. As Chief Justice John Marshall said in Mar bury v. Madison , the theoretical foundation of judicial review, "The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the Constitution is written."

In their book "Desperately Seeking Certainty: The Misguided Quest for Constitutional Foundations," Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry of the Berkeley and Vanderbilt law schools, respectively, note that judicial review amounts to blocking a contemporary majority in the name of a past majority -- the one that produced the Constitution through democratic ratification conventions. Americans rightly regard this as an especially dignified majority -- one owed special deference because it was the product of an unusually deliberative moment, the founding.

Furthermore, Farber and Sherry note that in America's system of governance, majority rule is not limited only by courts. There are, for example, vast powers vested in institutions such as the Federal Reserve. Technically, the Federal Reserve is a creature of Congress; actually, its primary function is to insulate very technical and consequential decisions from gusts of popular opinion.

As Farber and Sherry say, most Americans are much more affected by what the Federal Reserve influences -- prosperity; protecting the currency as a store of value by controlling inflation -- than by anything the Supreme Court says about flag burning as free speech or Christmas displays as the establishment of religion. But as James Madison, the foremost Framer, said, "There can be no doubt that there are subjects to which the capacities of the bulk of mankind are unequal."

Ardent majoritarians may be scandalized by the fact that 51 senators from the least populous states, representing just 17 percent of the nation's population, could defeat a bill. But the Senate, which the Constitution's Framers did not intend to be popularly elected, was, said Madison, supposed "to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led." The more purely democratic House does not even participate in such momentous decisions as the confirmation of judges or ratification of treaties.

Although properly modest judges seek to minimize it, there are, inescapably, policymaking dimensions of, or consequences from, what these unelected officials do. But as Farber and Sherry say, judges are chosen by a process -- nominated by elected presidents, confirmed by elected senators -- grounded in democratic accountability. And there is another problem with "obsessing about the countermajoritarian nature of the court'':

"Judges are only part of the governance system; they are not our rulers. To assume that the whole system can be legitimate only if each part would be legitimate standing alone is to commit what economists call the 'fallacy of composition.' "

Finally, since Thomas Jefferson, no significant politician has flatly opposed judicial review. Even when the Supreme Court was most athwart public opinion -- striking down New Deal legislation -- voters sharply rebuked President Franklin Roosevelt for his plan to "pack" the court by enlarging it. So this is another powerful argument for the compatibility of judicial review with America's democratic values: the demos -- the public -- supports it.

New York Times
August 25, 2005
Technology Levels the Business Playing Field
By HAL R. VARIAN

ACCORDING to the Small Business Administration, "small businesses represent 99.7 percent of all firms, they create more than half of the private nonfarm gross domestic product, and they create 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs."

When we think about the economic impact of information technology, the first companies to spring to mind are the industry giants like Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo. But the biggest impact on the economy may well show up in small and medium-size enterprises.

The reason is that information technology is a great leveler. As computers get cheaper, more powerful and more connected, technologies that were only available to the Wal-Marts of the world become available to the small fry.

Think about the lowly cash register. There was a big innovation in the 1880's, when manufacturers added a bell that sounded when the money drawer opened, so owners would know when someone had access to the cash. But after that, the technology barely changed for almost a century.

The big chains like Wal-Mart could use satellite networks and mainframe computers to track purchases, manage inventory and record customer behavior. But the little retailer had to do with the old mechanical registers, scrolling through the paper tape in the evening by hand and punching numbers into an adding machine to balance his books.

Then along came the personal computer. By the late 1980's cash registers had become just another computer application. They could add up receipts, compare sales with inventory, create order lists - in short, they could do just about everything that the big chains could do. In the 1990's, cash registers became networked, allowing the small stores to download records in a form suitable for spreadsheet analysis and accounting software.

These intelligent cash registers allowed small companies to adopt business models that had previously been available only to large enterprises. Equipped with a scanner, a cash register could be used to verify the sale of each item, allowing companies to share data on revenue with the supplier. Some ice cream manufacturers effectively contract for space for a freezer in a store and share the revenue from purchases each time a sale is made.

Even the success of the big Internet companies rests, in large part, on the fact that they provide advertising and sales platforms for small enterprises. EBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo all make it possible for small businesses to reach national, and even global, markets, that were previously inaccessible.

The Internet has not just affected the selling side of small businesses; it is also having a big impact on the production side. I met recently with two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. One, Rashmi Sinha, told me her software company had six employees: two in the United States and four in New Delhi. The other, Cosimo Spera, started a company to develop applications and services for mobile phones; his company has five employees in the United States, eight in Spain and two in Italy.

Both of these micro-multinational companies work pretty much the same way, using e-mail, Web pages, voice-over-Internet phone services and other Internet technology to coordinate their far-flung operations. "Just think," said Ms. Sinha, "my little six-person operation is now a global business."

American workers complain about big businesses sending jobs offshore to India and China. Economists say that the benefits from international trade outweigh the costs, which is great as long as you are not one of the costs.

But offshore work means something quite different to the micro-multinationals. These companies simply would not exist without access to foreign labor. If they succeed, they will certainly hire more American workers as they grow.

The internationalization of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a big plus for the American economy. It allows the small players to have access to labor markets that only the big boys could afford a few years ago.

It is no surprise that many of these small, high-tech, international entrepreneurs are foreign-born. They have the contacts, the connections and that most critical ingredient, the ambition, to assemble the pieces needed to start a business.

It is almost impossible for an entrepreneur to put a foreign development team together without some strong connections on the ground. Even large multinationals have found out that outsourcing is not the panacea it was proclaimed to be. Paradoxically, it is easier for the micro-multinationals to deal with the inconvenience of outsourcing than it is for the big international corporations. Entrepreneurs are willing to do things that big international corporations will not do - like staying up until 11 p.m. and using cheap voice-over-Internet technology rather than expensive international telephone service.

Constant supervision, constant communication and constant coordination are necessary to make small business grow. But it is just these things - the ability to supervise, communicate, and coordinate at a distance - that have become so much cheaper in the last 20 years. Big enterprises were the first to reap the benefits of this technological progress. But the impact of information technology on small and medium-size enterprises may yet turn out to have the most impact on the economy.

Hal R. Varian is a professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Henry David Thoreau

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

[1849, original title: Resistance to Civil Government]

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which the will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.

This American government — what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed upon, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at one no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

snip

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for other to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man. But it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.

snip

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which I have also imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

Quick question: is it legal to post articles in their entirety like this without the permission of the copyright owner?

Just wondering, because I usually restict myself to smallish excerpts when I quote articles from other sites, with a link to the full text article at the other site, out of concern for violating copyright laws.

Kuwaiti: 'The terrorist Katrina' is a soldier of Allah'



Special to World Tribune.com
MIDDLE EAST MEDIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Thursday, September 1, 2005
Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment's research center, published an article titled "The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah, But Not an Adherent of Al-Qaeda."(1) the Aug. 31 edition of the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa. Following are excerpts:


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"...As I watched the horrible sights of this wondrous storm, I was reminded of the Hadith of the Messenger of Allah [in the compilations]of Al-Bukhari and Abu Daoud. The Hadith says: 'The wind is of the wind of Allah, it comes from mercy or for the sake of torment. When you see it, do not curse it, [but rather] ask Allah for the good that is in it, and ask Allah for shelter from its evil.'

"When the satellite channels reported on the scope of the terrifying destruction in America [caused by] this wind, I was reminded of the words of [Prophet Muhammad]: 'The wind sends torment to one group of people, and sends mercy to others.' I do not think — and only Allah [really] knows — that this wind, which completely wiped out American cities in these days, is a wind of mercy and blessing. It is almost certain that this is a wind of torment and evil that Allah has sent to this American empire.



"But I began to ask myself: Doesn't this country [the U.S.] claim to aspire to establish justice, freedom, and equality amongst the people? Isn't this country claiming that everything it did in Afghanistan and Iraq was for truth and justice? How can it be that these American claims are untrue, when we see how good prevails in the streets of Afghanistan, and how it became an oasis of security with America's entrance there? How can these American claims in the matter of Iraq be untrue, when we see that Iraq has become the most tranquil and secure country in the world?"
"But how strange it is that after all the tremendous American achievements for the sake of humanity, these mighty winds come and evilly rip [America's] cities to shreds? Have the storms joined the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization?

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"How sad I am for America. Here it is, poor thing, trying with all its might to lower oil prices which have reached heights unprecedented in all history. Along with America's phenomenal efforts to lower the price of oil in order to salvage its declining economy and its currency — that is still falling due to the 'smart' policy America is implementing in the world — comes this storm, the fruit of Allah's planning, so that [the price of] a barrel of oil will increase further still. By Allah, this is not schadenfreude.
"Oh honored gentlemen, I began to read about these winds, and I was surprised to discover that the American websites that are translated [into Arabic] are talking about the fact that that the storm Katrina is the fifth equatorial storm to strike Florida this year... and that a large part of the U.S. is subject every year to many storms that extract [a price of] dead, and completely destroy property. I said, Allah be praised, until when will these successive catastrophes strike them?

"But before I went to sleep, I opened the Koran and began to read in Surat Al-R'ad ['The Thunder' chapter], and stopped at these words [of Allah]: 'The disaster will keep striking the unbelievers for what they have done, or it will strike areas close to their territory, until the promise of Allah comes to pass, for, verily, Allah will not fail in His promise.' [Koran 13:31]."

Endnote: (1) Al-Siyassa (Kuwait), August 31, 2005.

9/5/05
By Fouad Ajami
The Work of Patriots

BAGHDAD--There can be no denying that the drafting of an Iraqi constitution was designed to be one of the signal moments in Iraq's political transition. It had been hoped that this would provide one of those defining images of the remaking of Iraq, on par with the fall of Saddam Hussein's statue in April of 2003, his capture eight months later, the transfer of sovereignty in the summer of 2004, and those exhilarating elections last January. We were not to get this kind of satisfaction. After political delays over Sunni participation, the drafters were left with a tight deadline of just 10 weeks to complete their task. Then they ran up against the fractured political realities of Iraq.

For all the impatience with this process, we should not underestimate all the good constitutional work that has unfolded in Iraq. We should be done with the boogeyman image that these makers of Iraq's constitution will hatch a theocratic republic. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing particularly startling about asserting that Islam is "a main source of legislation." Nor ought we give in to panic because an article in the constitution decrees that "no law that contradicts Islamic principles should be issued." Iraq is not Sweden or France. Iraqis are fated to have in their constitution a measure of deference to the Islamic faith. They will live secular lives but pay respect to the Islamic container of their public life. Indeed, the very same article that acknowledges Islam's role is followed by a stark declaration: "No law that constricts democratic principles shall be issued."

"The sun." We must acknowledge that the talk of theocracy imported to Iraq, through the odd instrument of an American war, is a coded attack on the political aspirations of the Shiite majority of Iraq. We are forever looking for Iran in Iraq's life, expecting some pale version of Iran to be imposed in Iraq. This is not in the cards. Even the Shiite jurists of Najaf do not seek a religious state. "We are Arabs. We don't want Iran to rule us," I was told, on the grounds of Shiism's holiest site, the Imam Ali shrine, by its influential overseer, Sayyid Muhammad al-Ghurayfi. "Najaf is the sun. The other centers of Shiism revolve around it."

This decent regard for keeping religion at bay in the political world animates the thought and worldview of the chairman of the constitutional drafting committee, Sheik Humam Hamoudi. A worldly, sophisticated man born in 1952 into an elite culture of privilege that the tyranny of Saddam Hussein all but devastated, Hamoudi was aware of being "a turbaned man" at the helm of a principally secular undertaking. He had donned the turban, he says, in 1984, while in exile in Iran. But he was formed by an Iraqi home steeped in commerce and dealings with the foreign world. His grandfather had been chairman of the chamber of commerce in Baghdad, and there had been many western wives in the extended family. He had grown up in a part of Baghdad, East Karrada, which had, he recalls, more churches than mosques. There had been a healthy regard for Islam in his home but no excessive zeal. His brother, a physician, had made his way to Columbus, Ohio; his sister, also a physician, now lives in Indiana. Hamoudi has no patience with those who would impose their religious convictions on others. By all accounts a skilled and forgiving political player, he gave me an enduring image of his innate pragmatism. "As a boy, I loved the Tigris and the Euphrates, two separate rivers, coming together at Shatt al-Arab to form a single source of life." I can't see this man, or others like him, bringing a reign of religious terrorism to Iraq.

The political and religious terrorism stalking Iraq and making its life sheer hell is altogether different. It came days ago in the form of a message from one of the terrorist brigades, warning of death and damnation to any Sunni Arabs who partake in politics or who register to vote in the October 15 referendum on the constitutional draft. The message declared political participation a form of heresy, an apostasy that amounts to breaking with Islam, a surrender to "the crusaders" and their collaborators--the "Shiite heretics" and the Kurds who "seceded" from Islam. It might have been messy, this business of writing a constitution. But set against the background of this kind of darkness, the effort must be seen as a noble calling for a people too long caught up in a historical nightmare.

New York Times
September 8, 2005
Katrina's Silver Lining
By DAVID BROOKS

As a colleague of mine says, every crisis is an opportunity. And sure enough, Hurricane Katrina has given us an amazing chance to do something serious about urban poverty.

That's because Katrina was a natural disaster that interrupted a social disaster. It separated tens of thousands of poor people from the run-down, isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped. It disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty.

It has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs, and given us a chance to rebuild a city that wasn't working. We need to be realistic about how much we can actually change human behavior, but it would be a double tragedy if we didn't take advantage of these unique circumstances to do something that could serve as a spur to antipoverty programs nationwide.

The first rule of the rebuilding effort should be: Nothing Like Before. Most of the ambitious and organized people abandoned the inner-city areas of New Orleans long ago, leaving neighborhoods where roughly three-quarters of the people were poor.

In those cultural zones, many people dropped out of high school, so it seemed normal to drop out of high school. Many teenage girls had babies, so it seemed normal to become a teenage mother. It was hard for men to get stable jobs, so it was not abnormal for them to commit crimes and hop from one relationship to another. Many people lacked marketable social skills, so it was hard for young people to learn these skills from parents, neighbors and peers.

If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as rundown and dysfunctional as before.

That's why the second rule of rebuilding should be: Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. The only chance we have to break the cycle of poverty is to integrate people who lack middle-class skills into neighborhoods with people who possess these skills and who insist on certain standards of behavior.

The most famous example of cultural integration is the Gautreaux program, in which poor families from Chicago were given the chance to move into suburban middle-class areas. The adults in these families did only slightly better than the adults left behind, but the children in the relocated families did much better.

These kids suddenly found themselves surrounded by peers who expected to graduate from high school and go to college. After the shock of adapting to the more demanding suburban schools, they were more likely to go to college, too.

The Clinton administration built on Gautreaux by creating the Moving to Opportunity program, dispersing poor families to middle-class neighborhoods in five other metropolitan areas. This time the results weren't as striking, but were still generally positive. The relocated parents weren't more likely to have jobs or increase their earnings (being close to job opportunities is not enough - you need the skills and habits to get the jobs and do the work), but their children did better, especially the girls.

The lesson is that you can't expect miracles, but if you break up zones of concentrated poverty, you can see progress over time.

In the post-Katrina world, that means we ought to give people who don't want to move back to New Orleans the means to disperse into middle-class areas nationwide. (That's the kind of thing Houston is beginning to do right now.)

There may be local resistance to the new arrivals - in Baton Rouge there were three-hour lines at gun shops as locals armed themselves against the hurricane victims moving to their area - but if there has ever been a moment when people may open their hearts, this is it.

For New Orleans, the key will be luring middle-class families into the rebuilt city, making it so attractive to them that they will move in, even knowing that their blocks will include a certain number of poor people.

As people move in, the rebuilding effort could provide jobs for those able to work. Churches, the police, charter schools and social welfare agencies could be mobilized to weave the social networks vital to resurgent communities. The feds could increase earned-income tax credits so people who are working can rise out of poverty. Tax laws could encourage business development.

We can't win a grandiose war on poverty. But after the tragedy comes the opportunity. This is the post-Katrina moment. Let's not blow it.

TechCentralStation
09/07/2005 
Bad Bets
By Vaclav Smil

By last Tuesday afternoon I suspected that much.

By Thursday evening -- after I saw a distraught black woman pleading into a TV camera: "Help us, they are raping children out there!" and after I watched other cameras repeatedly scanning that massive crowd of helpless people that waited for days to be given, or even just told, anything to ease their pain --- I was sure.

I knew that Ayman al-Zawahiri must be immensely pleased as he watches these scenes (his English is good, but no English is needed to interpret that unraveling) on his Pakistani (maybe Iranian) TV. This predictable -- almost totally avoidable and hence overwhelmingly self-inflicted -- disaster will cost the US more than did the attack on the World Trade Center that he helped to mastermind. But the money cost may be a lesser part of it. More importantly, Katrina's aftermath proved in a most graphic fashion that the only remaining superpower is increasingly helpless to respond to any threats in any coherent way. And perhaps the deepest message of Katrina's aftermath is how it exposed the frightening fragility of urban America and the increasingly Third-World nature of much of its urban environment and population: the world's only remaining superpower is rotting from the inside.

Let me explain, just briefly. Predictability of Katrinas must be clear to any school child: they are a matter of recurrent when and not if, and any rational, risk-minimizing society (let alone the world's richest one) should be taking constant systematic steps to minimize their impact. Hoping that a hurricane path will miss you, building levees to meet no more than the hurricane category 3 threats and permitting unlimited construction along the entire Gulf of Mexico coast are all state- and federally-sanctioned acts that are just asking for disasters to happen, a form of high-level gambling. Most gamblers, of course, lose.

Perfect defenses are impossible, near-perfect ones are exceedingly costly. A rational society with limited wealth to spare on any particular challenge would favor passive prevention and limited push-back. An easiest step to take, it would not allow any new permanent construction along any shoreline that could be swept by a massive storm surge. That is, after all, a matter of kindergarten physics: a cubic meter of water weighs 1000 kg, a cubic meter of air weighs 1.2 kg, a thousandfold difference; and the vertical impact power on structures goes up with the cube of speed on top of that. Under such a regime, all old structures would be gradually wiped out by hurricanes, and new structures -- built beyond the storm surge reach (this may be, depending on the terrain, just 50 m or 2 km inland) to high wind-resistance standards -- would be able to survive all but the strongest conceivable cyclones. Fortunately, America, unlike Bangladesh, has plenty of land to leave the land that belongs (recurrently but most violently) to the sea to the sea. Those libertarians who might object to an outright building ban (but we zone everywhere as it is, so why not?) might like the idea of having the incorrigible beach-builders paying the real price for their insurance, not one subsidized by millions of people in safer locations. Few would find that affordable.

A rational decision-maker inheriting a city sunken below the sea level faces a tougher challenge than gradually reducing and eventually eliminating the sprawl along a coast, but the same strategy applies. Discourage the city's further growth, build a second, less formidable, line of defenses behind the existing (reinforced) dykes (that is what the Dutch have been doing recently, setting aside areas that will be deliberately flooded, not defending every bit of land) and manage its decline. After all, regardless of what you do, the current rate of deltaic erosion will turn the city into an utterly indefensible island in a matter of five to six generations.

But the safest of all bets is to conclude that the sanctimoniously defiant "we shall rebuild" cry will, yet again, prevail and that billions will be spent to set up more infrastructure for future destruction. There is no will, at any governing level, to behave rationally. But this multibillion dollar waste is in the future. What we see already is the multibillion dollar waste called the Department of Homeland Security whose megamachinery of dozens of agencies has been shown to base their decision on information that was vastly inferior to broadcasts freely available on radio and TV to the rest of the world.

Much has been said about the immensely catastrophic nature of Katrina. Yes, of course, in terms of the area affected and the misery it brought to hundreds of thousands of people -- but, no, if we are thinking about what the DHS should be thinking, countless worse and worst scenarios. How about having hundreds of thousands of dead bodies, as was the case with the Sumatran tsunami, in a radioactive environment, not just (fortunately) a limited number of casualties in shallow dirty water? If Zawahiri thinks as a cost-benefit maximizer, Katrina taught him a crucial lesson: why bother with any such arcane (and costly and unpredictable) stuff as dirty bombs when an equivalent of a couple feet of dirty water will do.

The one lesson that would be easiest to act on is to remember that large segments of all major US cities are inhabited by populations whose standard of living is more African than American. In any massive catastrophe, all young, sick, helpless and decent people of this population will became instant victims, while the predatory, violent segment of this population will take control of the chaotic place. Everybody found something incredible about Katrina's aftermath; few details can compete with the fact that, as a CNN reporter repeated breathlessly, a group of policemen (those who did not desert!) in a major US city was, four days after a hurricane, banding together to defend -- their own police station!!! Is this a glimpse of America's future? Are similar scenes, on a much larger scale, amidst much more impassable chaos and thousands of dead bodies possible? If Katrina will teach at least one limited lesson it should be this: do not let Los Angeles or San Francisco, after a 9.0 magnitude quake, pass into the hands of gangs. But I am afraid that is exactly what is coming, especially when you take into account the number of gang members in California.

Vaclav Smil is the author of Energy at the Crossroads.

Wall Street Journal
September 7, 2005; Page A17
Gambling with Your Money, Their Lives
By Holman W. Jenkins Jr.

Food, water -- and laying blame. The human necessities have been on exhibit in the New Orleans flood catastrophe.

In the interests of having the argument heard, let's phrase a key question in a bipartisan manner: Will the federal government contemplate some adjustment to policies that amount to a powerful inducement for people to build in areas that are fundamentally vulnerable? Professions of shock about the extent of the New Orleans disaster may be understandable from the broader public, but not from Louisianians themselves. Their disaster was the most predicted disaster in recent memory. The city's vulnerability was well documented and this is one case where you can't blame the press for taking its eye off the ball.

The policy implications were not lost on congressmen and federal officials either. A screaming match three years ago concerned a House bill to charge market-based flood insurance premiums to homeowners who filed frequent claims. Louisiana Rep. Billy Tauzin (since retired) denounced the bill as "an assault on the culture of South Louisiana." He was right.

The bill's author, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, put the issue in less hysterical perspective: "The notion that the federal government is just going to shovel money to people in harm's way is misguided, and I personally think it's cruel." He was right too.

President Bush, during one of his landfalls in the disaster zone, promised to build Trent Lott a "fantastic new house" in Pascagoula. This would have been music to the ears of locals, a prelude to tendering an unlimited bill to federal taxpayers to rebuild. However, what New Orleans residents may finally get out of last week's disaster is that the jig is up, the crazy contradictions of their city have reached an end point.

To rebuild in a way safe from a recurrence of the Katrina flood would be to darken the city's neighborhoods behind vivisecting walls and ever higher levees -- or to spend unfathomable sums to lift the town five or 10 feet above the surrounding waters. As Louisianians themselves are likely to conclude, a better approach -- perhaps the only sane approach -- is to relinquish the city's lowest elevations back to the waters. Originally known as the Crescent City because settlement was restricted to high land along the Mississippi, New Orleans could become the Crescent City again, focused on its historic districts and the tourism traffic they generate.

Indeed, all this must come to pass now that the city's wish-fed gamble against the odds has come a cropper, a bet that no sensible government would be willing to make again with even higher stakes.

Back in 1968, Washington was already in despair at what it had wrought and got into the flood insurance business as a way to make property owners finally bear the cost of their own recurrent bailouts. It didn't help. The money flowing to flood victims through all channels has grown geometrically, subsidizing ever more risk-taking. Legion are the tales of homeowners who, over a few years, collected payments several times the worth of their houses. Homes not only are replaced but are built bigger and more ornate each time. Cities and localities have no reason to deprive themselves of the tax base by zoning against development on their floodplains if Washington will pay them to rebuild each time.

Bob Sheets, then-head of the National Hurricane Center, described the aftermath of 1979's Hurricane Frederic. "It was like an urban renewal program out there. And that kind of thing takes place almost any place you've had a big hurricane strike."

Modern New Orleans was the ultimate expression of this high-rolling dynamic. In 2000, an unnamed city official succinctly explained the city's hurricane strategy to the trade publication Risk & Insurance: "We are below sea level and we do get floods sometimes, but it's not a real serious problem. You can still purchase flood insurance."

OK, we all use insurance as a substitute for hazards we are unable or unwilling to protect against. We buy fire insurance instead of fire-proofing our homes to a fare-thee-well.

But a corollary to the city's acceptance that sooner or later it would be destroyed by a hurricane (and rebuilt using insurance money) was a reliance on evacuation to spare human life in the event of a Category 4 or worse storm, of which there had been four since 1899. That would have meant evicting residents every time a hurricane threatened, a policy that likely would have collapsed after the first false alarm, had a decrepit municipal government cared enough to try it. Instead the city defaulted to an evacuation strategy that was tantamount to every man for himself until it's time to reassemble and collect the checks that will be rolling in.

It would have taken a heroic political effort to change this dynamic, equivalent to a decision to invade Afghanistan before 9/11. Nor is President Bush Superman, cape flapping in the wind as he personally braces up the levees. Of one thing you can also be sure: Tomorrow's inquisitors will overlook his real contribution to last week's mess -- his capitulation three years ago to the media and Congressional clamor to create a new homeland security department.

That agency was destined to become an instant monument to the law of diminishing returns, even if it served as a useful offering of waste and futility to allow Mr. Bush to pursue an aggressive foreign policy. It distorted the nation's domestic priorities, as if the country were besieged by terrorists (it's not), and predictably devolved into an exercise in pork barrel, unrelated to risk.

To protect everything is to protect nothing. Lost in the shuffle was apparently the capability to respond quickly to national disasters that are far more certain to occur, such as killer hurricanes.

At least Katrina has put the terrorism threat back into perspective.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal and writes editorials and the weekly Business World column.

Washington Post
Sunday, September 11, 2005; B01
A Sad Truth: Cities Aren't Forever
Who, What, When, Where, Why?

By Joel Garreau

The city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt.

The tourist neighborhoods? The ancient parts from the French Quarter to the Garden District on that slim crescent of relatively high ground near the river? Yes, they will be restored. The airport and the convention center? Yes, those, too.

But the far larger swath -- the real New Orleans where the tourists don't go, the part that Katrina turned into a toxic soup bowl, its population of 400,000 scattered to the waves? Not so much.

When Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert said that it makes no sense to spend billions of federal dollars to rebuild a city that's below sea level, he added, "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." In the face of criticism, he hurried to "clarify" his remarks. But according to Washington lore, such a flap occurs when someone inadvertently tells the truth. New Orleans has had a good run for 287 years, but even before Katrina hit, the city was on the wane, as its steadily dropping population figures for decades have shown.

All the brave rhetoric about the indomitable human spirit notwithstanding, we may want to consider some realities. As much as it causes heartache to those of us who love New Orleans -- the whole place, not just the one of myth and memory -- cities are not forever. Look at Babylon, Carthage, Pompeii.

Certainly, as long as the Mississippi River stays within its manmade banks, there will be a need for the almost 200 miles of ports near its mouth. But ports no longer require legions of workers. In the 21st century, a thriving port is not the same thing as a thriving city, as demonstrated from Oakland to Norfolk. The city of New Orleans has for years resembled Venice -- a beloved tourist attraction but not a driver of global trade.

Does the end of New Orleans as one of America's top 50 cities represent a dilemma of race and class in America? Of course. There are a lot of black and poor people who are not going to return to New Orleans any more than Okies did to the Dust Bowl.

What the city of New Orleans is really up against, however, is the set of economic, historic, social, technological and geological forces that have shaped fixed settlements for 8,000 years. Its necessity is no longer obvious to many stakeholders with the money to rebuild it, from the oil industry, to the grain industry, to the commercial real estate industry, to the global insurance industry, to the politicians.

If the impetus does not come from them, where will it come from?

New Orleans, politically defined, is the 180.6 square miles making up Orleans Parish. (In Louisiana a "parish" is comparable to a county.) This place is roughly three times the size of the District of Columbia, though in 2004 it was less populated and its head count was dropping precipitously.

The original reason for founding La Nouvelle-Orléans in 1718 was the thin crescent of ground French trappers found there. Hence the name "Crescent City." Elevated several feet above the Mississippi mud, it was the last semi-dry natural landing place before the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico. That crescent today is where you find all the stuff that attracts tourists, from the French Quarter, to the Central Business District (the "American Quarter") with the convention center and the Superdome, to the Garden District and Uptown. This area is roughly comparable to Washington from Adams Morgan through K Street to Georgetown and Foxhall Road.

That tourist crescent is relatively intact. (Only two of the 1,500 animals at the Audubon Zoo died.) But it is only perhaps 10 percent of the city.

The rest to the north of the river -- as distinct from the Algiers district on the south bank, which has always been something of an afterthought -- is under as much as 25 feet of water. For the last 90 years, this vast bulk of the city has required mammoth pumps to clear the streets every time it rains. This is where you'd find working folk -- cops, teachers and nurses -- with bathtub madonnas and colored Christmas tree lights. It's also where you would find areas of soul-destroying poverty, part of the shredding fabric of a city that had a poverty rate of 23 percent. Planners have warned for years that this area would be destroyed if the levees were ever breached.

Yet, as novelist Anne Rice wrote of her native city a week ago: "The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy. Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries . . . . They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs."

Sentiment, however, won't guide the insurance industry. When it looks at the devastation here, it will evaluate the risk from toxicity that has leached into the soil, and has penetrated the frames of the buildings, before it decides to write new insurance -- without which nothing can be rebuilt.

Distinct from Orleans Parish is the rest of metropolitan New Orleans, with a population of 850,000 -- twice that of the "city." These parishes, including Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John, Plaquemines and St. James, were hard hit. There was four feet of water in some expensive living rooms in Metairie. But they were not scenes of comparable devastation.

Also distinct from the city are the region's ports, lining 172 miles of both banks of the Mississippi, as well as points on the Gulf. For example, the largest in the Western Hemisphere is the 54-mile stretch of the Port of South Louisiana. It is centered on La Place, 20 miles upriver from New Orleans. It moved 199 million tons of cargo in 2003, including the vast bulk of the river's grain. That is more than twice as much as the Port of New Orleans, according to the American Association of Port Authorities. The Port of Baton Rouge, almost as big as the Port of New Orleans, was not damaged. Also, downstream, there is the LOOP -- the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port out in the Gulf that handles supertankers requiring water depths of 85 feet. These ports are just a few of the biggest.

Illustrating how different the Port of New Orleans is from the city, its landline phones were back in business a week ago, says Gary LaGrange, the port's president and CEO. "The river is working beautifully," he reports, and "the terminal's not that bad."

Throughout the world, you see an increasing distinction between "port" and "city." As long as a port needed stevedores and recreational areas for sailors, cities like New Orleans -- or Baltimore or Rotterdam -- thrived. Today, however, the measure of a port is how quickly it can load or unload a ship and return it to sea. That process is measured in hours. It is the product of extremely sophisticated automation, which requires some very skilled people but does not create remotely enough jobs to support a city of half a million or so.

The dazzling Offshore Oil Port, for example, employs only about 100 people. Even the specialized Port of New Orleans, which handles things like coffee, steel and cruise boats, only needs 2,500 people on an average day, LaGrange says. The Warehouse District was being turned into trendy condos.

Compare that to the tourism industry, which employs about 25,000 people in the arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation and food sectors -- some 5 percent of the city's former population, according to the census.

New Orleans's economy is vividly illustrated by its supply of white-collar jobs. Its Central Business District has not added a new office building since 1989, according to Southeast Real Estate Business. It has 13.5 million square feet of leasable office space -- not much bigger than Bethesda/Chevy Chase, where rents are twice as high. The office vacancy rate in New Orleans is an unhealthy 16 percent and the only reason it isn't worse is that 3 million square feet have been remade as hotels, apartments and condominiums.

There are no national corporations with their headquarters in New Orleans. There are regional headquarters of oil companies such as Chevron and ConocoPhillips, but their primary needs are an airport, a heliport and air conditioning. Not much tying them down. In the Central Business District you will also find the offices of the utilities you'd expect, such as the electricity company Entergy. But if you look for major employers in New Orleans, you quickly get down to the local operations of the casino Harrah's, and Popeye's Fried Chicken.

Hardly a crying demand for a commercial entrepot.

This is not the first time that harsh realities have reshaped cities along the Gulf of Mexico.

The historic analogy for New Orleans is Galveston. For 60 years in the 1800s, that coastal city was the most advanced in Texas. It had the state's first post office, first naval base, first bakery, first gaslights, first opera house, first telephones, first electric lights and first medical school.

Then came the hurricane of Sept. 8, 1900. As yet unsurpassed as the deadliest natural disaster in American history, it washed away at least 6,000 souls. Civic leaders responded with heroic determination, building a seawall seven miles long and 17 feet high. Homes were jacked up. Dredges poured four to six feet of sand under them.

Galveston today is a charming tourist and entertainment destination, but it never returned to its old commercial glory. In part, that's because the leaders of Houston took one look at what the hurricane had wrought and concluded a barrier island might not be the best place to build the major metropolis that a growing east central Texas was going to need.

They responded with an equally Lone-Star-scale project, the 50-mile-long Ship Channel. It made inland Houston a world port. In the wake of the Spindletop gusher that launched the Texas oil industry, Houston became the capital of the world petroleum industry. As the leaders of the "awl bidness" were fond of saying, "Don't matter if the oil is in Siberia or the South China Sea -- you buy your rig in Houston or dig for it with a silver spoon." Houston went on to become a finance, medical, university, biotech and now nanotech center. The first word from the surface of the moon was not "Galveston." It was "Houston?"

What will New Orleans be known for in 100 years?

How a city responds to disaster is shaped both by large outside forces and internal social cohesion. Chicago rebuilt to greater glory after the fire of 1871 destroyed its heart. San Franciscans so transformed their city after the earthquake and fire of 1906 that nine years later they proudly hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to toast the Panama Canal and their own resurrection.

Not long ago, I co-taught a team of George Mason University students in a semester-long scenario-planning course aimed at analyzing which global cities would be the winners and losers 100 years from now. The students were keenly aware of the impact that climate change might have on their calculations, among hundreds of other factors. Yet in the end they could not bring themselves to write off such water cities as New York and Tokyo. They simply wouldn't bet against the determination and imagination of New Yorkers and the Japanese. As someone put it at the time, "If it turned out New York needed dikes 200 feet high, you can just hear somebody saying, 'I know this guy in Jersey.' "

Will such fortitude be found in New Orleans? In his 2000 book, "Bowling Alone," political scientist Robert Putnam measured social capital around the country -- the group cohesion that allows people to come together in times of great need to perform seemingly impossible feats together. He found some of the lowest levels in Louisiana. (More Louisianans agree with the statement "I do better than average in a fistfight" than people from almost anywhere else.) His data do not seem to be contradicted by New Orleans's murder rate, which is 10 times the national average. Not to mention the political candidates through the ages who, to little effect, have run on promises of cleaning up the corruption endemic to the government and police force. New Orleans is not called the Big Easy for nothing. This is the place whose most famous slogan is " Laissez les bons temps rouler" -- "Let the good times roll."

I hope I'm wrong about the future of the city. But if the determination and resources to rebuild New Orleans to greater glory does not come from within, from where else will it come?

Joel Garreau, a Post reporter and editor, is the author of "Edge City: Life on the New Frontier" (Doubleday).

Washington Post
Sunday, September 11, 2005; B07
Hindsight: A User's Guide

By Michael Kinsley

As a good American, you no doubt have been worried sick for years about the levees around New Orleans. Or you've been worried at least since you read that official report back in August 2001 -- the one that ranked a biblical flood of the Big Easy as one of our top three potential national emergencies. No? You didn't read that report back in 2001? You just read about it in the newspapers this past week?

Well, how about that prescient New Orleans Times-Picayune series back in 2002 that laid out the whole likely catastrophe? Everybody read that one. Or at least it sure seems that way now. I was not aware that the Times-Picayune had such a large readership in places like Washington, D.C., and California. And surely you have been badgering public officials at every level of government to spend whatever it takes to reinforce those levees -- and to raise your taxes if necessary to pay for it.

No? You never gave five seconds of thought to the risk of flood in New Orleans until it became impossible to think about anything else? Me neither. Nor have I given much thought to the risk of a big earthquake along the West Coast -- the only one of the top three catastrophes that hasn't happened yet -- even though I live and work in the earthquake zone.

Of course, my job isn't to predict and prepare for disasters. My job is to recriminate when they occur. It's not easy. These days the recrimination business is overrun like Baton Rouge with amateurs, who are squatting on all the high ground. The fetid aroma of hindsight is everywhere.

Sen. Mary Landrieu and other Louisiana politicians have been flashing their foresight all over the tube. They say they asked repeatedly for more money so that the Army Corps of Engineers could strengthen the levees, but repeatedly the Bush administration actually cut the Corps budget instead. The Corps itself is feeling pretty smug. It has long wanted money to build levees that would survive even a Category 5 hurricane, let alone a measly Category 4 such as Katrina.

Sure, and if there were a Category 6 or a Category 473, there would be a dusty Corps of Engineers report in a filing cabinet somewhere asking for money to protect against that one, too. The Corps has done many marvelous things. But it would cement over the Great Lakes or level Mount Rainier if we would let it.

Its warnings about natural disasters are like the warnings of that famous economist who has predicted 10 of the past five recessions.

Likewise, a senator may not be the best judge of the need for a vast federal construction project in her state. Landrieu's I-told-you-so's would be more impressive if the press release archive on her Web site didn't contain equally urgent calls to spend billions of dollars to build boats the Navy hasn't asked for in Louisiana shipyards, self-congratulations for having planted a billion dollars of "coastal impact assistance" for Louisiana in the energy bill (this is before the flood), and so on. Did she want flood control, or did she want $10 million to have "America's largest river swamp" declared a "National Heritage Area"?

Obviously -- obviously in hindsight, that is -- we should have spent the money to strengthen the New Orleans levees. President Bill Clinton should have done it. Presidents George Bush Senior and Ronald Reagan should have done it. As Tim Noah notes in Slate, warnings about the perilous New Orleans levees go back at least to Fanny Trollope in 1832. In fact, the one president who is pretty much in the clear on this is our current Bush -- not because he did anything about the levees but because even if he had started something, it probably wouldn't have been finished yet.

Everybody is having a fine fit about our politicians, our governments at every level, our "institutions" (current vogue word) for failing us in this crisis and others. The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to "get angry."

But just Google up a phrase like "commission warns," or "urgent steps," or "our children's future" -- or simply "crisis" -- and you may develop a bit of sympathy for the people who stand accused today of ignoring the warnings about anything in particular. Far from being complacent about potential perils, we suffer from peril gridlock.

Did all the attention and money devoted to protecting us from a terrorist attack after Sept. 11, 2001, leave us less prepared for a giant flood? Undoubtedly. And if the flood had come first, the opposite would be true. We, the citizens, would have demanded it and then blamed the politicians and the institutions when it turned out to be a bad bet. There is no foresight. We fight the last war because hindsight is all we have.

The writer is editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times.

New York Times
September 15, 2005
Ready? Cue the Sun...
By DAVID BROOKS

Arlen Specter Welcome to Day 3 of the confirmation hearings of John Roberts. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind the nation of what a wonderful job I'm doing chairing this committee, and I'd like to let the ranking member tell me so.

Patrick Leahy Absolutely, Mr. Chairman! And let me kick off this morning's platitudes about the grandeur of our Constitution by quoting its first three words, "We the People." That means that here in America the people rule - except on issues like abortion, where their opinions don't mean spit.

Specter Very well put, Senator Leahy! And welcome Judge Roberts back before our committee.

John Roberts Jr. Aw, shucks. This has been a humbling experience, Mr. Chairman. To think that a boy from an exclusive prep school and Harvard Law could grow up and be nominated for the Supreme Court - it shows how in America it's possible to rise from privilege to power! That's the hallmark of our great nation.

So while, of course, I can't talk about specific cases, or any emotions, weather patterns or sandwich meats that may come before the Supreme Court at any time between now and my death in 2048, I do want to reiterate that I feel humbled by this experience. I feel humbled that my wife is dozing off behind me. I feel humbled by this committee's inability to lay a glove on me. And I feel modest. You see this suit? I skinny-dip in this suit. That's how modest I feel.

Tom Coburn Well put, Judge Roberts. Yet when I think of the polarization that still divides this great nation ... waaaahhhh ... waaaahhhh. (Senator Coburn breaks down weeping.)

Jeff Sessions This may be a good moment to remind my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that in this country unelected judges don't write the laws. We have unelected lobbyists to do that. Under our system, judges merely interpret the law and decide presidential elections.

Specter Senator Sessions, let me interrupt you right there. We're not here to argue among ourselves and ignore the nominee. We're here to deliver 30-minute speeches disguised as questions and ignore the nominee. So let me turn to Senator Bid - -

Coburn And when I think of the flaws in the reconciliation process! And the gerrymandering! Oh, the suffering! Oh, the humanity! Waaaahhhh ... waaaahhhh. (Senator Coburn collapses and is taken back to his office on a stretcher.)

Specter As I was saying, Senator Biden, you have the floor.

Joseph Biden Jr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thought this might be a good moment to give the committee a complete history of my heroic sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt myself by mentioning that I ride the train every day, often speaking with regular Americans, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt my interruption of myself by asking the chairman to restrain the nominee. During my first round of questioning, the nominee continually interrupted my questions by trying to give answers. I could barely keep up my train of thought on stare decisis.

Edward Kennedy Starry De Cysis? Didn't she do a fan dance down at that old burlesque house in Providence?

Roberts Mr. Chairman, I certainly don't mean to draw attention to myself, for, as I have said, judges are like umpires - not home plate umpires, but those umpires stuck way out by the right-field foul pole. Nobody ever went to a game to watch the umpires.

But as you know, Judge Ginsburg, during her confirmation hearing, had herself wrapped in duct tape for fear that any involuntary reflex gestures she might make would mar her impartiality in deciding cases later on. Following her example, I have decided to spend the rest of these hearings in a soundproof booth, sunk in a tank of ravenous sharks and accompanied only by the illusionist David Copperfield. But before I go into isolation, I would like to mention the intense modesty I feel at this moment, notwithstanding the fact that not a single one of you slobs could have charged $700 an hour the way I did in private practice.

Richard Durbin Judge Roberts, before you go, one of the ways we in the Senate prove our superior souls is by emoting mawkish sentimentality on cue. Would you please emote sadness and pain on behalf of politically powerful but downtrodden groups?

Roberts I am emoting, senator.

Washington Post
Sunday, September 18, 2005; B01
Look What the Tide Brought Back
By Dick Meyer

Looking at the pre-Katrina political theory floating out there with the rest of the storm's flotsam and jetsam, it's clear that when it comes to the role of the government -- big, federal, blow-the-wad government complete with presidential bells and whistles -- both political parties now face what earnest, horn-rimmed students used to call "internal contradictions."

Here's the nut of those contradictions: Recently, Democrats have been talking like the party of small government even though they really believe in the functions and mission of big government. Meanwhile, Republicans, who have long professed not to believe in many of the missions and functions of big government, have been expanding the government substantially.

In his prime time address to the nation on Thursday, President Bush tried to wire together both these tangled strains of American political thought into a single life raft. On the one hand, he said, "The system, at every level of government, was not well coordinated and was overwhelmed" while, on the other hand, promising to lead "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen." So the government -- the very same government that so many Republicans since Ronald Reagan have mocked and denigrated, and which, Bush says, bungled Katrina -- became in a single speech both the solution and the problem.

If Hurricane Katrina revealed fatal, knowable and manmade flaws in New Orleans' basic geography, it has done much the same for Americans' collective view of government's basic mission along with its size, scope and finances. And if Katrina forced open gushing cracks in the city's levees, it has also pried open oozing fissures in the political parties' governing philosophies, or at least how the parties peddle those philosophies.

In the post-Clinton era, Democrats have acted like Taft Republicans of the 1950s, fighting for balanced budgets at home and against active idealism abroad, and combining it all with an allergy to charisma that the incurably dull Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft would have envied. Post-Clinton Republicans have acted like a caricature of 1970s Democrats -- fiscally reckless, hooked on pork, big spending and cronyism, and committed to idealistic do-goodism abroad.

In the end, both the parties and the voters are responsible for an affliction the country now suffers: We seem to feel we have a right to much more from government than we care to pay for; this essentially moral failing has a name in the economic world -- it's called a deficit.

The massive spending necessary to deal with Katrina will of course exacerbate this deficit, fiscal and moral. More fundamentally, Katrina, combined with 9/11, seems to have rekindled the notion that government's basic mission is to protect stuff -- people, property, commerce and daily life. If the politicians come to believe (through polling) that Americans don't believe government is doing enough to protect them, they will throw money and more crisis czars at the problem. They've already started. It will be expensive and it will not be pay as you go.

How are partisan theoreticians processing this?

On the liberal side, an exemplary manifesto is E. J. Dionne Jr.'s recent column in The Washington Post that declared flatly, "The Bush Era is over." Liberal blogs and Web sites like HuffingtonPost.com ran this as a banner headline.

But it's somewhat hard to see why the Bush era is dead even if he's in some deep and dirty water. He's got three years left and solid GOP majorities in Congress. Is there something larger afoot? Dionne thinks so. "The source of Bush's political success was his claim that he could protect Americans," he wrote. "Leadership, strength and security were Bush's calling cards. Over the past two weeks, they were lost in the surging waters of New Orleans." At least the Democrats hope so.

Democrats still have the problem of answering this: Give us a hint of what the Democratic era is, please. You'll recall this was a problem in November of 2000 and 2004.

Speaking of the ends of eras, 10 years ago in January, William Jefferson Clinton declared in his State of the Union Address, "The era of big government is over." That was a big headline in those days, coming from a Democrat. He was promptly reelected and nearly impeached during a feckless second term that didn't do much big or small. Except cut the deficits.

Since losing the White House, the Democrats have complained wildly about a war that most of them voted for, about deficits caused by tax cuts passed with many of their votes and about overspending, including pork that they probably would have wanted more of. Until New Orleans, they hadn't spent much wind talking about the classic mission of 20th-century big government -- fighting poverty. So are the Democrats now the party of small government? Well, not really.

David Wessel, in a terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 8, made his own declaration: "The era of small government is over. Sept. 11 challenged it. Katrina killed it." He added: "Despite a conservative Republican president with a Republican majority in the Congress, small government has been more principle than practice lately. President Bush has presided over the nationalization of airport security screeners, the creation of the sprawling Homeland Security bureaucracy, the largest expansion of Medicare since Lyndon Johnson signed it into law and a 20 percent increase in all federal spending, adjusted for inflation, even before the cost of responding to Hurricane Katrina." Not to mention, say, the unparalleled federal expansion into education of No Child Left Behind just a decade after Republican orthodoxy was to abolish the Department of Education. So can we stop referring to the Republicans as the party that wants government off our backs?

Now that big government is back in, sort of, will the Democrats abandon their newfound fiscal prudishness? And how will Democrats get voters to trust them more with the "big government" issues du jour -- civil protection, national defense and domestic security? Will Democrats run in 2006 as better rescuers? They can -- and have -- argued that Bush's (and indeed Reagan's) visible disdain for bureaucracy and government has sapped federal competence. But as a recovering television producer, I sure wouldn't want to have to cut that into a 30-second spot.

In a piece exhorting the Democrats to go for the GOP jugular on Katrina (yes, more blame game, please), John Dickerson of the online magazine Slate approvingly quotes a nameless strategist who said they need to show "that we can be the daddy party." How helpful.

The Republican dilemma is more immediate and concrete. And it goes well beyond their embarrassment and frustration at the federal response to Katrina.

First off, the Bush agenda is now drowning in its own toxic soup. The administration's plans for Social Security and private accounts, the cornerstone of the "ownership" agenda, were barely bobbing afloat in choppy waters before Katrina was even a glimmer in a weather forecaster's eye. Now key items on Congress's fall docket are kaput. Republicans planned to try to extend the 15 percent tax rate on dividends and capital gains. That has been put off for the time being, as has legislation to make cuts in the estate tax permanent.

For many Republican theoreticians, tax cuts are not only stimulants for the economy, they're built-in shackles to government growth. So now there are no new shackles in the hopper, there's a war to finance, a natural disaster that has cost $62 billion already and a country with an apparently increased desire for competently delivered basic protective services. Hmm. Sounds like big government. But remember, Republicans, Ronald Reagan said government was the problem, not the solution.

For Republicans like Oklahoma's Sen. Tom Coburn, government as the solution is a big problem -- and one of those "internal contradictions." Coburn has joined with Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain to try to enact some immediate, deep spending cuts to offset the Katrina expenditures. "The president could exercise leadership by insisting that we set priorities and offset the cost of Katrina relief by making changes elsewhere," he told John Fund of the Wall Street Journal. "Sadly, we don't have that leadership."

In that same article, Fund reminded Bush that FDR financed World War II by cutting other spending by 20 percent from 1942 to 1944, slashing some of his own favorite programs. And, he argues, Harry Truman slashed non-military spending by 28 percent in 1950 to pay for the war in Korea. Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation makes a very similar argument in a column called "Hurricane of Entitlements" on the National Review Online.

Small-government conservatives have been complaining about Bush's spending habits for a while. One of their house organs, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, published a piece by a Cato Institute scholar, Chris Edwards, last Feb. 2 that said, "fiscal conservatives are fed up . . . Clearly, the White House believes that big spending is good politics." The headline, of course, was "The Era of Big Government."

The post-Katrina administration is getting it from other conservative flanks too. George Will is the guardian of the classic conservative view that the human power to fix is vastly overrated. He warned the administration not to take its nation building down to sodden New Orleans, and not for fiscal reasons but because he thinks the administration demonstrated civic hubris on a global level in Iraq.

Voters have tended to escape blame in post-Katrina analysis, but I've had a harder time being charitable. I've come to think "the voters" see the government like a pharmaceutical company. They feel entitled to cheap if not free access to products and services, they want everything to be risk-free, and they want compensation if something goes wrong. Politicians of both parties have been perfectly willing to pretend the world can work that way (witness the Katrina blame game). But it can't.

There is a strong temptation to look forward and say that perhaps after 9/11 and Katrina, the focus of what we want from government will be competence, at least enough to ensure that people won't die of thirst on the flooded streets of a major American city. You can see the appeal now of a 21st-century version of Herbert Hoover who, after feeding Europe and leading flood relief in six states, was elected in 1928 as the rescuer, the engineer, the man of action.

Competent, hard-working government is easy to promise, but it's hard for voters to believe in. It's hardly the stuff of modern strategy and campaign ads. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are prepared to be honest about how they really intend to run and finance big government. And as "eras" come and go, that honesty deficit remains constant.

Dick Meyer is editorial director of CBSNews.com, where he writes the "Against the Grain" column.

My reason was that he was the lesser of two evils.