Flint's water crisis isn't a failure of austerity. It's a failure of government.

This was not the fault of government austerity — but government incompetence, negligence, and rank stupidity. No amount of spending can fix that.

The Flint River
(Image credit: AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

Flint, Michigan, near where I live, has become a national scandal for distributing lead-laced water to its residents for 16 months. Lead poisoning, especially among children, is linked to irreversible brain damage, violent behavior, Legionnaire's disease (a form of pneumonia), and numerous other health problems. That such a Third World-worthy disaster should happen in a rich country like America is shocking and shameful.

But its root cause is not a cheapskate Republican governor hell bent on imposing a diet of austerity on a struggling city, as many liberals have concluded. It is that entrusting government, which failed spectacularly at every level, to protect the health of its citizens is dangerous naivety.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.