Are we all entitled to a boat?

A recent op-ed piece by Eugene Robinson, of The Washington Post, entitled No Longer Invisible, contains this excerpt in response to the Katrina disaster:

No one can claim that the post-Reagan orthodoxy of low taxes and
small government, which does wonders for the extremely rich, also inevitably
does wonders for the extremely poor.

What was that about a rising tide lifting all boats? What if you don't have aboat?

I have two issues with this. The first is that the "...orthodoxy of low taxes and small government" is a figment of the imagination. The GOP talks a good game when it comes to reducing taxes and the size of government, but somehow government seems to get larger and larger and spend more and more money every year. The federal government is not "small" by any stretch of the imagination. There is nary an aspect of our daily lives in which government doesn't have its grubby fingers.

The second is the implicit message that government should supply boats for those who don't have them. It shouldn't. Individuals should be left alone to make their own "boats". Certainly there are those who are incapable of doing so or who have fallen on hard times, in which case reaching out to another individual or private charity is perfectly acceptable. The more we rely on government, however, the more powerless we become to help ourselves.