I hate writing about natural disasters, especially when their misery surpasses anything imaginable to me.

Such as a cyclone that kills over 100,000 people who were just barely surviving in the first place in one of the poorest countries in the world. Foreign diplomats and aid workers inside Burma estimate that Friday’s cyclone resulted in 2-3 million homeless and that there are at least 44,000 missing.

The Burmese government has consistently given lower number of killed or missing. The original “official” death toll from the storm was 300 but now stands at 22,000.

And you’ll forgive the political scientist in ME but this is yet another one of those occasions that serves to illustrate the difference between good governments and bad governments.

Good governments are transparent, flexible and they exist as part of a social contract people in a society create themselves. Bad governments are reclusive, rigid and exist to serve a narrowly-defined set of self interests

Obviously, neither one can stop a cyclone, hurricane or earthquake but the good ones make recovering from natural disasters a priority and will use every resource available to help every citizen recover.

Most of the 55 million people in Burma survive on less than a dollar a day. It’s GDP per capita ($1,700) makes it one of the poorest nations in the world and it’s Human Development Index (HDI) score (.583) ranks it as one of the worst places on the planet to live.

Worse yet, because Burma is one of the most isolated nations on earth, so many Burmese have no idea how bad off they are. Burma has been ruled by a brutal military dictatorship since 1962, making it one of the longest-lived authoritarian regimes in the modern world.

There is a common misperception that military/authoritarian regimes are extremely efficient but they are in fact extremely corrupt and wasteful. Transparency International, an NGO that ranks the relative degree of corruption in countries, ranks Burma and Somalia as the world’s leading kleptocracies with scores of 1.4 out of 10.

And Somalia doesn’t even have a functioning government. Think about that for a minute.

So, as the Burmese junta accepts foreign aid but rejects foreign aid workers and journalists coming who want to come to Burma to assist and report on the recovery from Cyclone Nargis one might ask “why”?

The answer is pretty simple: the last three things that an authoritarian regime wants outsiders to see are 1) their incompetence, 2) their weaknesses, and 3) their general lack of concern for their own people.

Outside assistance has got to come more swiftly than the Burmese government is willing to allow to alleviate further suffering. United Nations relief flights are now starting to arrive in country but the UN World Food Program has stated that concern about the military siphoning off aid was one reason for the delay.

It has been suggested that the best thing the outside world can do right now is put pressure on the government of China to lean on the Burmese military dictatorship to accept more outside assistance particularly direct aid from nations like the United States.