The Compassion of Profits

The National Post has an interesting summary of a study of the responses to Hurricane Katrina. The gist of the study was that Wal Mart and other big box retailers provided the best immediate respose to the disaster. I don't necessarily enjoy shopping at Wal Mart, but I certainly am not one of these folks that condemns them at every opportunity. This has got to sting for Wal Mart's critics who contend that Wal Mart is an evil exploiter of the poor in America and worldwide.

Of particular interest to me was this comparison of government to enterprise:

Companies must, to survive, create economic value one way or another; government employees can increase their budgets and their personal power by destroying or wasting wealth, and most may do little else. Companies have price signals to guide their productive efforts; governments obfuscate those signal.

This point has always been ignored in my opinion. The idea that bureaucracies and governments act in some benevolent interest has always baffled me. Just because someone has a government title doesn't mean they will stop acting in their self interest. It only means that their actions have less accountability to the public. WalMart's success and FEMA's failure only serves to underscore this.

Paul and Huckabee

Doug Wead has a particularly insightful take on US presidential politics and the future they portend. He is spot on in his analysis that neither Paul nor Huckabee was necessarily in it for electoral victory. He points to the organizational benefits of extending a campaign in building a movement. His comparison of previous campaigns was particularly apt:

In years past, on the Democrat side, Black candidates have stuck around long after they should have pulled out, just to collect names. There was a reason. And in 1988, Evangelical Pat Robertson kept hanging on in his effort to win the Republican nomination.

I would point to the more recent Pat Buchanan interlude to the Republican party as evidence of this benefit. Pat's 1992 run for president could be considered quixotic from the get-go. Pat was able to gain a significant following and greatly increase his success in 1996.

Weade also makes a salient observation of the style of campaign that each ran or is running:

What’s next? Sometime, when all of this settles down, after McCain has not picked Mike Huckabee as his running mate, Huck will announce his Political Action Committee. We will hear a lot from Mike Huckabee next time around. His is a personal campaign.

And Ron Paul? His is a campaign of ideas. His enemies in the political arena and in the media will come to realize too late that they made a mistake by ignoring him this past election cycle. His army was left unchallenged on the battlefield. Now their ideas have taken root and they will grow.

Indeed, Paul's attraction to a substantial minority of Americans is precisely his emphasis on ideas. His is not a cult of personality, but rather a loose collection of individuals that value Paul for individual reasons. Paul doesn't make one feel good or comfortable. He in fact makes a good many people in his own party feel distinctly uncomfortable by taking a stand on issues at odds with the majority of his party, but based on the principles they claim to espouse. It is one thing to brush off a long haired hippy protesting the Iraq war, it is another thing entirely when an air force veteran, budget hawk, pro-life republican congressman vocally opposes it and uses the Republican president's words from his 2000 election campaign to sell his point.

I have to agree with Weade's conclusion:

Huckabee, will own the headlines for now. But Ron Paul owns the future.

We can hope.