I think David Brown, writing in the Washington Post, is on to something. Not enough people in an emergency were willing to throw the rule book out and just do what needed to be done. Too many people will wait for permission rather than take the risks that were necessary in an emergency like Katrina.

From what I've seen -- in daily life, as well as in my reporting -- two things have poisoned American decisiveness, at least in the public sector.

One is the consciousness of legal liability that has permeated our culture in the most astonishing way. The shortest, safest school outing requires signed releases. School nurses can't give children a tablet of ibuprofen without parental permission. Paper coffee cups warn me that coffee is hot. I bought a kayak a couple of years ago that came with a sticker -- "Important Notice! Read Before Use!" -- informing me that kayaks are used on water and that people can drown if they don't wear life jackets or don't know how to swim.

...Another reason many Americans in authority hesitate to make risky decisions is the fear of criticism and even public humiliation -- at the hands of the news media, late-night comedians and, now, the nonstop cacophony of the blogosphere.

Many members of my profession make a living, pay mortgages and send children to college in part by telling people how they could have done things better. We make a point about conflicts of interest, whether real or merely perceived, and whether or not they would make any difference. We get on the case of people who do too much, and we get on the case of people who do too little. We are obsessed with motive, and in general assume questionable competence or bad faith among public servants.

Except in the rare case where action is immediately deemed heroic and subjected to little criticism -- the behavior of fire and law enforcement officials on Sept. 11, 2001, is a notable example -- there are few functions of government that, in their minds at least, reporters, editorial writers and columnists couldn't do better. Not to mention Jon Stewart.

While this critic-and-second-guesser role is an important part of journalism, in practice there's too much of it, and it comes at a price. The price is that people have become afraid to do things that fall outside their job description without explicit permission and implied forgiveness for possible bad outcomes.

Five days after the hurricane, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official ordered Mark N. Perlmutter, a 50-year-old orthopedic surgeon from Pennsylvania, to stop treating patients on the tarmac of the New Orleans airport because he had not filled out the proper paperwork. He protested, explaining that the woman he had just diagnosed with diabetic ketoacidosis might die without immediate intravenous fluids and insulin. But he was led away. The official said to him, "We cannot guarantee tort liability protection," Perlmutter told me yesterday.

After learning that on-site certification wasn't yet possible, the doctor was allowed to return to the tarmac and get his medical instruments. The woman, who was semi-conscious when he'd first seen her, was dead, Perlmutter said. He then flew to Baton Rouge in a helicopter and got certified, a process he said "took about two minutes."

Regulations are, perhaps, put in for serious purposes and we shouldn't be encouraging people to break the law, but sometimes common sense should trump everything else.

UPDATE: Gary in the comments section reminds me of Phillip Howard's excellent book, The Death of Common Sense, which outlined how regulations are putting individual enterprise in a straitjacket and how bureaucrats are also imprisoned by red tape. Sadly, his arguments are even more appropriate now than they were when he wrote the book in 1988.