Using Disaster Funding To Rail Against Privatization

Oliver Willis is using the fact that government disaster money is flowing into the Louisiana area to argue against privatization.
Here’s the gist.

… the savior of Mississippi and Louisiana will not be some privatized entity, some benevolent source of private funding. When Mississippi and Louisiana recover – and they will – they will have the much derided federal government to thank. It will be money from the federal government, along with disaster relief from federal agencies like FEMA and the National Guard that will aid these states and bring them back to glory.
And that’s how it should be.

Read the whole thing.
Oliver’s premise is a ridiculous one, and here’s why: There is a difference between government money budgeted for disaster relief and money budgeted for things like education. Nobody wants to privatize something like disaster relief because there’s no way to privatize it.
Disaster relief is a unique animal. There’s not really any way to make money out of providing it, so private enterprise doesn’t do it. Thus there is no alternative to having the government provide this sort of thing. The only thing that comes close is insurance, but all they do is cut you a check for your losses after the fact. They don’t save lives.
Schools, to use one of Oliver’s examples, are a much different thing. There is a private education industry in this country and it works quite well. Students who attend private schools are, by and large, better educated (in a more efficient and cost-effective manner) than kids in public schools. And its been proven in practice that when parents are given options for their child’s education, allowed to “shop with their feet” if you will, kids (especially low income and minority kids) get a better education.
This is the conservative philosophy at work. If you want efficiency, quality and cost-effectiveness you must have competition. If you just let the government handle things like education you’re going to get a product that is typically just good enough to meet the very minimum standards. Why? Because there’s no incentive to work any harder. Teachers and school administrators know that as long as they do a “just good enough” job their own jobs and salaries are safe because their “customers” (the students) really don’t have anywhere else to go.
Government is a fat, inefficient behemoth. Private industry, on the other hand, is a sleek and efficient machine. These are simple truths observable in countless places in our society, and because they’re true it means that we should seek to supplant government with private industry wherever possible. The people who would tell us that government does things better than private industry are saying so because either a) they’re a politician or otherwise benefit from the government initiative in question or b) they’re social marxists who don’t believe that private citizens, and not politicians or bureaucrats, are best suited for making the decisions that most directly effect them.
Is private industry possible in the area of disaster aid? I’m not sure. I’m not prepared to make that argument, but using disaster aid as an example against privatization is just plain silly.