For those of us unfamiliar with geologicalterminology, it may come as a shock that the Chilean quake, rated 8.8 on theRichter scale, was roughly 500 times more powerful than the Haitian quake inJanuary, which rated 7.0. Yet in Haiti,probably more than 200,000 lives were lost; in Chile, the number of dead isestimated at about 800. While that is still a terrible tragedy, the Chileandeath toll is far less than 1% of that in Haiti.
The two disasters were different in ways thatcertainly explain at least part of the huge disparity in loss of life andproperty damage. The tectonic shift that hit Haitiwas much closer to population centers, and of course Chile is a wealthier and moredeveloped country, with a functioning government, a literate population and arecent history of coping with earthquakes. In 1960, the largest quake everrecorded struck near the Chilean city of Valdivia,killing thousands there and stimulating a tsunami that damaged coastal citiesin Hawaii, Japanand the Philippines.
But that big quake in 1960 also led the Chileans tothink about how they should cope with the threat of another such disasteras anation. To strengthen new construction against earthquake damage, they legislateda strict revamping of building codes. And when democracy returned to Chile after twodecades of military dictatorship, those regulations were rewritten, in 1993, tomake them even more stringent. The seismic requirements demand that everystructure use a "strong column" design to ensure that it remainsstanding even in a severe quake.
Government-Provided Safety Measures
In a society with sane politics, rules andregulations needed to safeguard life don't provoke much debate, even on thefurthest ends of the ideological spectrum.
Everyone realizes that there are certain dangers towhich anyone can fall victim; protecting and insuring against those dangers isa social responsibility, a government function and a measure of human progress.
Here in the United States, however,anti-government ideology is a pandemic mental tic that has now developed into avirulent disorder afflicting a large number of citizensincluding many of ourself-styled conservatives. Infuriated because their party cannot permanentlycontrol the White House and the Congress, they have gradually persuadedthemselves that all government is evil, that all taxation is theft and that allregulation is tyranny. Or at least that is the tone of their rhetoric.
If the Chileans had adopted this kind of manic andreflexive attitude, many more of them would undoubtedly be dead today. The"free market" extremists who call themselves conservative probablywouldn't worry much about the loss of life, because they are far more concernedwith ideological consistency than with practical effects. But the rest of usmight consider the wiser approach of Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrianeconomist whose work is often cited by the extremists when they claim to bedefending freedom.
In The Road toSerfdom, perhaps his most popular work, Hayek explained that he saw noreason why "the state should not assist individuals in providing for thosecommon hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, fewindividuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness andaccident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts toovercome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision ofassistance, where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks, the case forthe state helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance isvery strong."
To Hayek, there was "no incompatibility inprinciple between the state providing greater security in this way and thepreservation of individual freedom."
It is worth noting, not so incidentally, that thegreat philosopher of the market was writing about health care rather thanearthquakes or tainted food or untested drugs in the passage quoted above. Butthe principle is the sameand ought to be remembered whenever we hear thepreposterous din of the Tea Parties and their corporate sponsors.
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