Mercatus Center’s Jennifer Zambone just published wonderful article called “Centralizing Compassion: A Disaster’s Tale.” In this article, she looks at what happens to societies and communities when the government becomes the only source of compassion. She concludes that if you leave it to the government, compassion will disappear and no one can do compassion better than individuals. These are insights she shares with the great French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, whom she quotes saying that:

What political power could ever carry on the vast multitude of lesser undertakings which the American citizens perform every day, with the assistance of the principle of association? . . . A government can no more be competent to keep alive and to renew the circulation of opinions and feelings among a great people than to manage all the speculations of productive industry. No sooner does a government attempt to go beyond its political sphere and to enter upon this new track than it exercises, even unintentionally, an insupportable tyranny; for a government can only dictate strict rules, the opinions which it favors are rigidly enforced, and it is never easy to discriminate between its advice and its commands. Worse still will be the case if the government really believes itself interested in preventing all circulation of ideas; it will then stand motionless and oppressed by the heaviness of voluntary torpor. Governments, therefore, should not be the only active powers; associations ought, in democratic nations, to stand in lieu of those powerful private individuals whom the equality of conditions has swept away.

Read the entire thing here along with other very good articles looking at the role of nonprofits in the aftermath of Katrina. They were all published a few days ago in the Mercatus Center’s magazine, Local Knowledge.