Now this is an excellent, rather than merely a good, point--thank you.

Though some people are looking to the government to provide assistance in rebuilding New Orleans so that they can (almost incomprehensibly to me) move back there, others are seeing what happens when you pass the responsibility buck and they are choosing to start over elsewhere. Perhaps one of the tragically learned lessons--by both those who are familiar with and those who are unaware of the idea--is that of moral hazard .

They really got the idea that there are some ways in which we must take individual responsibility for our choices (e.g., don't live in disaster-prone areas, if you can in any way avoid doing so) and work to hold our local/state/federal public servants accountable to whatever functions are properly theirs to perform. This, of course, begs for the discussion about which functions are proper to which level of government. With the death of C.J. Rehnquist (famously a "states' rights" proponent, in the way he understood that), a prominently lively debate on this topic should be ensuing. I only (perhaps Polly-Anna-ishly) hope that the upshot of such conversations--with the participation of classical liberals and libertarians--will bring greater clarity to mainstream public discourse and re-shape both public policy and private response approaches to these matters.