As America considers the prospect of rebuilding the Gulf Coast region and as The US government responds to Louisiana's demand to spend $250 billion to rebuild New Orleans, we must ask some serious questions of ourselves. When Democrats refuse to consider spending cuts and are echoed by Tom Delay, we must ask the question: have both political parties abandoned the idea of reducing the size of the federal government? Should government undertake projects that are better done elsewhere? Now is the time to ask, because the Great Society programs which produced the poverty and despair uncovered in New Orleans are foremost in our minds. It is time to re-examine not only what government can do but what it should do. At a time like this, there are too many voices saying the federal government should do it all. Have we learned nothing in the past forty years?

 Several writers this past week remarked that both San Francisco and Chicago rebuilt themselves within three years with no federal money. It all happened through private charity and private business. And so it can be in the Gulf Coast. The last message we should be sending is: 1. the government cannot cut spending and 2. the federal government is the best vehicle for ending poverty. The worst that could happen in the wake of Katrina and Rita is that massive federal response should be considered the knee-jerk response.

 New Orleans has never participated in the economic growth of the new south for several reasons, namely embedded government corruption, dating back to Huey Long and Edwin Edwards and now embodied in the New Orleans Levee Board, which spends lots of money on things unconnected with levees. Corruption on the one hand and big government welfare programs on the other, have produced a stagnancy worse than the stench on Bourbon Street. The combination of these two lead to chaos and despair. New Orleans cannot find a future and hope if it is rebuilt the way it was.

 American blacks in New Orleans cannot find a place in the American dream, if they are simply offered an updated version of Great Society giveaway programs warmed over for the 21st century. Poverty and hopelessness cannot be cured by Washington D.C. They will only yield to close at hand influences of family, community, churches and business partnerships. In fact, many blacks will never return to New Orleans for one simple reason. They have found the support, community and opportunities they sought, elsewhere. Why should they go back to a life in New Orleans that offered no way out?

 The answer for New Orleans is to unleash what President Bush calls the "armies of compassion." The faith-based and community groups, the entrepreneurs, businesses and capitalists who will make New Orleans a bustling, optimistic economic hub, not a place of indolence, entertainment and corruption.

 The political left in America are desperate for a victory in the wake of these disasters. The Congressional black caucus and liberal democrats think they have found it in proposing massive federal relief. They hope to turn the Great Society failure into a 21st century "extreme makeover." They want America to concentrate money and power once again in Washington D.C. $6.4 trillion were wasted on the war on poverty to produce a permanent dependent class that was only diminished when Bill Clinton finally "ended welfare as we know it" under pressure from a Republican congress. Rebuilding the "great society" is the last thing we should be doing now.

  John Pendleton