Vilsacking

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack is guestblogging at TPMCafe, where he writes:

Abraham Lincoln once said: "government should only do what citizens can not do for themselves or what citizens can not do better." Katrina and Rita prove the wisdom of that approach. Organizing mass evacuations, rescuing stranded homeowners, securing abandoned neighborhoods, financing long term and temporary housing, rebuilding public infrastructure, attending to medical needs, and avoiding future tragedies—those are items that government must do. Individuals, non-profits, and the private sector cannot, and should not, handle them.

The first half of the Lincoln principle sounds good, and I suppose I technically agree with the second for a narrow set of relatively important goods where the gap in (efficient) quality or quanitity between public and private provision is very large, though the curse of public provision is you never get to find out whether citizens might have done better. But what I'm really interested in is that bill of particulars, where a whole bunch of relatively disparate things are crammed together. I'll buy the first three and the "rebuilding public infrastructure" to varying extents, though on some of those fronts, the execution by government was so inept in the instance that it seems ordinary citizens often did do a better job at, say, rescuing stranded homeowners.

But… providing medical aid? Financing at least long term housing? Why on earth can't "individuals, non-profits, and the private sector" do those things? As plenty of pundits have remarked, if we hadn't been "financing long term housing" by way of subsidized flood insurance, we might not have had so many people in the path of disaster. And as for "preventing future disasters," well, I'm not sure what exactly that means beyond the specific items already listed—though, again, not distorting the cost of living in dangerous places might be a good start.

Then we get some very vaguely sketched idea for a "Patriot Bond"—presumably to establish "I'm full of innovative ideas" cred in case he opts for a longshot presidential run in '08 after all—as a mechanism for encouraging people to save more. Of course, not taking a 12 percent bite out of people's paychecks for a government pension might have a similar effect, and in any event it's not obvious that this would increase saving much, as opposed to displacing private capital formation.