Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

Full and edited versions of our podcasts are available on our website at

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Last September in his column for the Wall Street Journal, David Wessel wrote that the

era of small government is over and that Katrina killed it. Has Katrina become an excuse

to add more candidates to the long line of government programs

advanced by the Bush administration? Chairman of the Cato Institute

Bill Niskannon explores this possibility in today's podcast.

What is the primary policy lesson to be learned from the government's response to Katrina?

The biggest problem is that governments at all level will over promise, will raise the expectation of people what they will do in the future.

That will have the effect of reducing the amount of protection they take themselves,

or maybe even the amount of insurance they buy.

So what should the role of government be in disaster relief?

Specifically, what should the federal government do?

I think the federal government should do a number of things. One is to restore the infrastructure

for which it has had an historic responsibility. That's most importantly in the New Orleans case the levies, but also

highways. Other infrastructure the federal government has maintained in finance in the

past. Second is it should pay the people who bought federal flood insurance.

Not everybody bought flood insurance, but those people who did should get the money.

Third, I think that they should consider a new activity which would be to create an alternative set of regulatory rules when there's a disaster

so that it doesn't take trying to work around asbestos controls and safety controls and historic district controls and so forth

when you try to rebuild an after disaster.

...