Joe,

Genuine compassion?  Where's your genuine-o-meter?  I can't have genuine compassion for more than one person at a time?  I think you need to qualify that and say that Libertarians only manage to be compassionate to one person at a time.

In any case, I'll take the insincere help of well-paid members of a large, well-run government organization over the sincerity of one guy with a pickup truck anyday if it's going to save my city from the deluge.   

As for government, Joe, there is no such thing as government in the way that you talk about it whereas there are such things as computers. The two are not comparable; that's just empty rhetoric that sounds good.  Governments can't have compassion in the abstract, because no government exists in the abstract.  Governments are people.  Some have more compassion than others.  You, Joe, are the government, in case you've forgotten, since you, like the President, Dick Cheney, and my wife, the public defender, are a public servant who picks up a state check and who teaches at a public university. There's no difference between you and a FEMA director, and it's only your self-blindness that allows you to sit over there in your government building in your government department in your government office and fire off your usual rants about the lousy government.  You're complaining about yourself.  Tag, you're it.  You're what all the taxpayers you always worry about are paying taxes to support.  Don't you feel bad for those t
Christopher Stuart
UC Foundation Associate Professor
English Department
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga