Former Sen. Claire McCaskill was roasted by Tucker Carlson and others for her comments Wednesday about Hurricane Ian as it barreled through Florida.
“Now the one thing I do hope, Joe, to put a little politics in this,” she said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “We all are praying for the people of Florida. We hope the devastation is not deadly. We are glad for the cooperation, but when it’s all over, I hope some of those Floridians who hate the federal government remember that the federal government is there for them at a time of disaster.”
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As Carlson put it, yeah, this is a pretty gross thing to be saying while my own relatives are potentially in danger of dying. But now that there’s a bit of distance between then and now, I also want to point out that it’s a pretty stupid thing to say. Where did she get this idea that people in Florida hate the federal government?
So often, liberals become hopelessly obtuse when they’re confronted with the basic conservative principle of “limited government.” I don’t actually think they’re this stupid, but they have to try pretty hard in order to fake it. What McCaskill and so many others have done is attempt to equate “limited government” with the straw man position that there should be “no government.” This is just dumb. There do exist anarchists who believe in no government, but I don’t even think most people who call themselves “anarchists” would really embrace that position.
Almost nobody actually “hates the federal government” in the abstract. Maybe people hate that the federal government falsifies evidence, lies to judges, and arrests you with guns blazing at 3 a.m. for a trivial offense. Maybe they hate a government that takes half their paycheck and wastes most of the money making societal problems worse, not better. Maybe they hate a government that runs an abysmal education system or tries to micromanage life from 1,000 miles away — or that fights unnecessary wars or shoots unarmed suspects or whatever.
That doesn’t mean they can’t like the government that arrests and prosecutes violent crazies, trains Marines for battle, protects the borders, guards against terrorist threats, provides courts where people can adjudicate civil disputes, and yes, restores order after a major natural disaster.
Everyone who believes in the Constitution agrees, by definition, that government has some kind of rightful place in society. Even among the most extreme libertarian types, you would never find more than a tiny handful who agree that “all government is evil,” as Murray Rothbard maintained.
This idea of government having a proper role and no role beyond that shouldn’t really be that hard to wrap your head around, at least not if you are minimally intelligent. Government has legitimate roles — to protect human life and property rights, to guarantee contracts, to protect against foreign and domestic enemies, etc. The political disagreements we have tend to center on government taking on additional roles that it performs poorly or should not be performing at all, with consequences ranging from needless expense to active annoyance to outright oppression.
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If all the federal government did was help restore order after hurricanes, I don’t think anyone in Florida or anywhere else would be even slightly upset about government. But boy, a lot of people in Louisiana sure did hate the federal government after Hurricane Katrina. Were they out of line?
McCaskill must remember that — that’s the only thing that got her elected to the Senate in the first place.
