Stuck on stupid V: Whiners, ingrates, and opportunists

So the whining continues in Louisiana, that the state isn’t getting its handouts fast enough. After the hurricane disasters we’ve come to expect this from the likes of Gov. Kathleen Blanco and her minions such as Economic Development Secretary Michael Olivier, and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and other local elected officials, but now a portion of the business community has joined in.
I know this is impossible to expect, but before I hear any more moaning about how it’s unfair that, to date, the vast majority of monies coming from the generosity of the American taxpayer to help reconstruct the state have gone to out-of-state employers and their employees, see if any of the following apply to explain why that may be the case:

Did your state government make much of an effort to accomplish anything on its own instead of waiting for the federal government to take care of it and the state? In Mississippi, the state is paying unemployed oystermen to clean up debris – better than having them collect unemployment checks and complain about how out-of-staters were taking all the jobs.

Did you price yourself out of the market? Nagin implies there ought to a minimum wage of sorts around the $10 level. But what if the marketplace supports far less? What if it’s cheaper for the federal government (read, the spender of the American people’s money) to hire concerns who can bring in people cheaper than to pay local workers who insist on higher wages because they have used political clout to gain them?

Did you forget that of the money coming into the state for reconstruction that hardly any of it is yours in the first place? Don’t forget about the Golden Rule: this money is a gift of the American taxpayers, 98.5 percent of whom are not Louisianans, and they, not you, decide how it will be spent. Thus it’s pathetic when Olivier complains that the federal government contracts to feed people with military MREs rather than use local caterers and restaurateurs. Has he bought so quickly and thoroughly into our particular and peculiar Louisiana liberalism/populism’s notion that the state government has first claim on all resources, regardless of who gives them, that he can’t understand that this money isn’t his government’s and, just maybe, the federal government is trying to be as parsimonious as possible with using the American people’s money?

Did you support politicians whose policies have been damaging to business in the state? Populist notions such as “profit equals theft” have sent too many people to the capital eager to pass laws extracting as much as they can from the business community, and to engineer other sweetheart deals where political connections rather than ability and doing the job to specification mattered, making for lazy enterprise. It has created a weaker business environment that frankly needs the help of outsiders in a crisis environment such as this. These attitudes are encapsulated in Blanco’s comment that Louisiana “needs” jobs from the federal spending. No; jobs aren’t given away, they are earned.

All this griping and buck-passing from local and state governments to the federal government just continues to encourage the rest of the nation to think Louisianans enjoy nothing more than looking gift horses in the mouth, biting hands that feed us, and brings to mind any other cliché arguing that we are ingrates and opportunists. Criticism is fine when warranted, but we don’t have a divine right to any of this assistance and we’re lucky we’re getting what we are, and this carping going on conveys the opposite impression. Maybe a little less time spent bellyaching might translate into more time devoted to getting the reconstruction job done.