...at your expense, of course.

Dennis Hastert is in trouble for asking a reasonable question: Should New Orleans be re-built? The fact that he is in trouble for merely asking the question is indicative to me of just how much the American people, or at least a certain segment, just cannot and will not abide rationality.

"Why should the question be asked?" you may wonder. The question should be asked because, as I mentioned in a previous post, New Orleans has been sinking for a long, long, long, long, time. It is now 5 feet below sea level; when it was founded it was not below sea level. If and when New Orleans is re-built, it will continue to sink. (Who knows? It may then be ready for a new nickname. Instead of the Big Easy, maybe we will take to calling it the Low Down.) That is just one problem. The other problem is that the Mighty Mississippi will continue to dump silt, which means that the levees will be continually be in need of shoring up. This means that, however long it takes, another disaster such as we have seen this week will happen again. Is it smart to build a city on a patch of real estate everyone knows is sinking? Would you buy, or build, a house on a piece of real estate that you knew was sinking when you purchased it? Would you even purchase it? Would you think you were being smart if you did so? If a friend of yours did so, would you think he was being intelligent in doing so? (More importantly: How would you feel if he insisted on doing so with some of your money?)

"Where is your Christian compassion?" you may ask. New Orleans is where these people live. Their homes are there. Well, I am a Christian; I do feel--A LOT!!!--for these people. I can't think about all this for very long without crying. (And I am not easily moved to tears.) But, that being said, I am a Calvinist and that means that I believe in the application of wisdom to life, the right application of knowledge. So I am also, as a good Calvinist, committed to science, without driving an artificial wedge between "faith" and "science" as if there is no element of faith in any science (but that's a subject for a different post, on another day).

The application of the results of scientific research must lead one to the conclusion that, with all that we know now about the site on which the city was built, re-building the city there just would not be wise. Let us say that there was no city there right now. No responsible person would propose founding a city on that site. So why should the city be "refounded"? (In fact, I have heard, though not yet confirmed, that the local native Americans warned the French not to build a city there because, well, it floods. That was 300 hundred years ago .)

The only people who could support re-building New Oleans are people who like to allow sentimentality trump rationality. Frankly, I would like to see much less sentimentality about this and a lot more honest rationality. But I'm sure I won't see that.

But what about people who built in earthquake zones, or hurricane zones? Fine. But we are not talking about a city built in a hurricane zone. We are talking about re-building a sinking city! (On second thought maybe the Big Easy will be called the Big Money Pit.)

I suppose someone could say that, as a believer in liberty, I must be committed to the view that people can live wherever they want. And so I am. But then, I'll just have to say that I don't believe that anyone but you should pay for where you live. If the citizens of New Orleans truly want to rebuilt the Low Down fine by me, as long as they aren't going to demand federal dollars to do so. And it is only the fact that the site is sinking that motivates me to say this. All other things being equal, I wouldn't be saying this at all.

I don't understand why those who think that the city should be rebuilt can't just say so without demanding an apology from Hastert for asking an intelligent question. The responses to his asking the question are nothing more than a whole lot of emoting. I would like to see--and hear--less emoting, and more thinking.