Blame and shame.

with a closing line about Milton Friedman.

There's a lot of discussion about whether it's appropriate to be "blaming" for the Texas flood catastrophe and whether this is the right time to do it.

I'm not in favor of the kind of blaming in which people and organizations who may have contributed to this tragedy point at others to try to reduce their own culpability. But our only hope of being able to prevent another of these is to try to discover what, if anything, contributed to possible failures to predict the level of danger or any issues with the response.

It's a cultural problem, at least in part. We like to see

people pay for their mistakes. We want them to pay money and we often want them to suffer. We want revenge, not restoration. Sometimes we publicly shame them and ridicule them. We do all of these things by making ourselves forget that we are all capable of terrible mistakes. It's not always about willful negligence, or wanton disregard. It can be about error. It can be about working in systems that fail to give us the support we need, adding to the risk of error.

Not unrelated: I'm in favor of big government. Big, effective, ethical, compassionate government. I reject the idea that the business sector and big corporations will do the right thing because, in the long run, it will help their bottom lines to do so. We’ve had a half-century now of bad-mouthing government and using the word “regulation” with the same facial expression and tone we might use for “raw sewage.” Here’s my question: What do we have to show for it?

Also in related news: Milton Friedman was a punk was wrong.