MayerBlog: The Web Log of
David N. Mayer

After the Flood 

 It’s been over three months since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, leaving among its devastation the flood waters that severely damaged much of the city of New Orleans.  In the wake of the disaster – and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight – here are my observations on current developments, political controversies, lessons learned and lessons that are yet to be learned:

n      The Blame Game 

Almost immediately after the disaster, Demopublican and Replicrat partisans tried to fix the blame on the other party:  Democrats claimed President Bush was responsible (yet another example of that tired old game of Bush-haters blaming the president for everything they claim is wrong with America), while Republicans fingered the local politicians – Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, both of whom happen to be Democrats.  On this issue, at least, the Republicans have the more convincing argument.  Although it’s clear that Michael D. Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was a Bush crony who was not competent to do his job, neither FEMA nor the White House had the responsibility of first response to the Katrina crisis.  The principal failure was by state and local officials, chiefly Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin.   

The city of New Orleans followed virtually no aspect of its own emergency management plan, which provided that the mayor can call for a mandatory citywide evacuation; but the Louisiana governor alone had the power to carry out the evacuation, which Governor Kathleen “Blank-out” failed to do.  The plan states that a full evacuation of the city would take 72 hours and recognized that there were approximately 100,000 citizens of New Orleans who did not have means of personal transportation.  Neither Mr. Nagin nor Mrs. Blanco ordered buses to take people out of the city before the storm.  Blanco “begged” people to leave before the storm, but she did not issue an order for buses to roll until two days after the storm hit – by which time hundreds of buses in New Orleans were underwater and useless.  Both the mayor and the governor asked residents who couldn’t evacuate themselves to go to the Superdome – which, according to federal guidelines, was not a safe shelter.  The resulting tragedy – as the Superdome became the scene of chaos and violence, “an island in a submerged city” (as some reporters characterized it) – was the responsibility of these incompetent politicians.  Yet in the chorus of cries for Mike Brown’s resignation, nary a voice was raised calling for Nagin’s or Blanco’s resignations. 

n      FEMA Fatale 

If former FEMA director Mike Brown or the agency itself deserves some blame for its slow and inadequate response to the Katrina disaster, perhaps the problem is inherent in FEMA itself, a patronage-run agency that’s even more susceptible to politicization than the typical government agency. 

James Bovard, in his fascinating book “Feeling Your Pain”: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years (2000), devotes an entire chapter to FEMA, which he calls “Clinton’s greatest snow job.”   To understand why, some brief history is required.   As Bovard explains, “Until the early 1900s, disaster response was handled almost entirely by state and local governments and by private charities. [See the discussion – “It All Depends Who `We’ Is” – below.]  Then the federal government began doling out flood relief, which proved to be a popular pork barrel.  As a result, federal disaster aid was slowly expanded over the decades.  FEMA was created in 1979 largely to help civilians in case of a nuclear attack.  However, under Clinton, this agency function was almost completely disregarded.  As one career FEMA employee observed, `These people don’t give a hoot in hell about national security.’” 

During the eight years of the Clinton administration, FEMA became the epitome of government pork.  Clinton declared a “major disaster” some place in the nation on average every week, doling out more than $50 billion in disaster relief – far more than any previous president.  And the Clinton administration stretched the concept of “major disaster” to cover routine events rarely covered before – such as snow.  Snow accounted for a large portion of the skyrocketing number of federal emergency proclamations, with FEMA routinely covering 75 percent of the overtime costs of labor, equipment, and supplies during any 48-hour period of a snowstorm subsequently designated a “major disaster.  “There are few better ways for Clinton to show that he `feels your pain’ than by flying to a disaster area and having his lackeys throw federal checks at anyone they see.  FEMA is a prime example of the Nanny State – a government agency determined to spend tax dollars to rescue citizens, regardless of how irresponsible or negligent they have been and regardless of whether they have requested help. . . . FEMA has roughly ten times as many political appointees as other agencies its size – which might explain some of its contempt for safeguarding taxpayers’ money.  FEMA symbolizes government workers as knights on white horses, riding to the rescue with leaf blowers scattering federal dollars in every direction.  While the agency’s motto, `People Helping People,’ is plastered on its publications and headquarters, a more accurate slogan would be, `People Helping People to Other People’s Money.’”  (Bovard “Feeling Your Pain,” pp. 67-68). 

Bovard concludes, “FEMA under Clinton sought to maximize the number of people who hold out their hands for more benefits from Washington.  Politicians have trained citizens to come running to the nearest federal agency even for routine problems like snow or flooded basements.  . . . The political windfalls that follow a natural disaster epitomize how politicians’ and citizens’ interests are antithetical.  The more citizens suffer, the more politicians profit by throwing money and promises in all directions.  The only concept of `disaster’ guiding federal policy now is the horror that politicians may miss a chance to use tax dollars to buy themselves more votes.  Rather than a triumph of good management, FEMA has simply been converted into a political cotton-candy machine.  FEMA’s expansion symbolizes the proliferation of acceptable political pretexts for one citizen to stick his hand in another’s pocket.  FEMA’s popularity is one more sign of the decline of individual responsibility – or even a semblance of respect for such responsibility – in American political culture” (pp. 82-83).   

The subsequent career of James Lee Witt, who headed FEMA during the Clinton administration, verifies Bovard’s analysis about the politicization of the agency and its inherent potential for corruption.  A firm headed by Witt helped a Georgia company win federal contracts worth up to $85 million in work related to Hurricane Katrina and other major 2005 storms.  James Lee Witt Associates received $40,000 in lobbying fees this year for representing the Atlanta based company, AmeriCold Logistics, one of the nation’s largest cold-storage companies.  As part of the lobbying effort, Witt’s firm arranged a meeting between FEMA officials and AmeriCold.  Since Hurricane Katrina, Witt also has been hired as a disaster consultant for the state of Louisiana and other clients.  Keith Ashdown, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said Witt’s ability to bring FEMA and corporate clients together shows “his rise to the top in the world of disaster lobbying.”  He added, “If you want to get in the door, you’ve got to see the gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper is James Lee Witt.”  (“Ex-FEMA chief’s client won contract,” USA Today, Oct. 13). 

Set against the corrupt legacy of the Clinton administration, President Bush’s appointment of an incompetent political crony to head FEMA seems to be the least of the agency’s problems.

n      Obsessed with Negativity: The Failure of the Media 

Anyone who relies on “mainstream media” -- particularly network TV news – for information probably knows that the media loves to focus on negative stories and to cover them in a sensationalistic, pessimistic way.  This is so much so that virtually any negative story – from the latest developments in the war in Iraq, to the dangers of the “bird flu” – needs to be taken, by rational people, with more than just a grain of salt.  This phenomenon characterized media reports from New Orleans following the flood. 

Much of what was reported as fact by government officials and the media during the chaotic first week after Katrina has turned out to be fiction.  Mayor Roy Nagin warned the city’s death toll could reach 10,000 dead, a figure reported often in news accounts.  As of mid-October, Louisiana had confirmed just a little over 1,000 Katrina-related deaths in the entire state.  A tearful Mayor Nagin also reported on crime sprees at the Superdome, but an investigation by the New Orleans Times-Picayune found no evidence to support claims that babies were raped or that armed gangs were on a murderous rampage either in the Superdome or in the city.  Federal officials said it would take three months to drain the city, but six weeks later New Orleans was largely dry.  And contrary to all the news reports about the “toxic” floodwaters, researchers at Louisiana State University have found that the waters were no more dangerous than the city’s normal storm water runoff. 

The most “toxic” thing in New Orleans, it has turned out, was media hype and misinformation.

 n      The Case For or Against Government? 

Thomas Bray, in an insightful September op-ed in the Detroit News, raised the question whether the Katrina disaster helped make the case for or against government.  Citing remarks made by a history professor on a Los Angeles radio program – asserting that Katrina “might be our first libertarian atrocity” – Bray noted that advocates of big (and even bigger) government have tried to blame the disaster on the drive to cut taxes and to minimize government, which supposedly dealt a severe blow to government’s capacity to anticipate, plan for, and recover from natural disasters like Katrina.  “Democrats and some Republicans are making clear they hope to use the hurricane as a rationale for refusing to extend the tax cuts enacted in 2002-03 and even launching a new poverty program in the guise of hurricane relief.”  But, as Bray persuasively argues, “if there’s a message in Hurricane Katrina, it’s not that taxes are too low”:  “Indeed, federal tax revenue is $225 billion higher than a year ago – and up more than 50 percent in the last decade.  Federal spending has been rising fast, too:  It’s back up to about 19.5 percent of gross domestic product, almost exactly the average of the postwar era.”  He adds, “The problem is that it’s much more fun politically to spend billions on highly visible, $225 million bridges to nowhere in Alaska than on stronger levees in New Orleans.  In any case, America had large surpluses in the late 1990s, and nothing was done then to strengthen the levees either.” 

“If anything,” Bray concludes, “the response to Katrina helps made the libertarian case. . . . When the partisan hysteria abates a bit, what we are likely to find is that government at all levels failed to perform effectively. . . . Government failure is no accident.  Political incentives tend to make for a lot of misguided decisions, based more on who has the votes than on who really needs the money.”  (Bray, “Katrina makes the case against government,” Detroit News, Sept. 11). 

Libertarian R.W. Bradford, editor of Liberty, noted in the November issue of the magazine that the reason why Hurricane Katrine has become, “as we have heard over and over on television, `The Worst Natural Disaster in U.S. History’,” is fairly obvious:  "It happened because people gave too much responsibility to government.  It is no overstatement to say that the Katrina disaster is purely the fault of the government, at local, state, and federal levels.”  Bradford explains:  Nearly all the damage resulted from flooding in areas that are below sea level, “preposterously dangerous locations” where homes and businesses were built “because government programs drained these areas and planners decided to build there.”  These locations could have been made reasonably safe by building levees high enough to protect against the storm surge from Class 4 hurricanes, and Congress did appropriate money to build up the levees; but local officials spend it on other projects.  “And the homes were built at government direction in areas that even the government realized would inevitably flood on a grand scale.”  When the inevitable floods happened, “the politicians responded at first by ignoring the whole mess, then by blaming each other, and then by making grandstanding proposals to give government even more resources and power to deal with the problem. . . . But what’s most interesting about this whole sorry mess is the reaction of the American people.  Virtually nobody put any blame on the government itself for the flooding, even though damage would have been almost trivial if government had acted in anything like a prudent fashion during the century prior to the flood.”  (Bradford, “Who’s Really At Fault,” Liberty, Nov. 2005, pp. 15-16). 

As Sheldon Richman, editor of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty noted in the October issue of the magazine, “No one can say with certainty what would have happened had Katrina struck a region whose infrastructure, flood-control apparatus, and emergency-services establishment had not been a virtual government monopoly for as long as anyone can remember.  Nor can we know how much lower the death toll and hardship would have been had government at all levels not helped to perpetuate poverty through rotten schools, stultifying economic regulation, and more.   . . . What we do know is that people in the government’s care were stranded for days without food and water.  And we know that one important thing was lacking in the political-patronage sector as Katrina made her way through the Gulf of Mexico and into the Mississippi Delta:  entrepreneurship.  And it has been lacking for at least a century, when the local government and then the Army Corps of Engineers took charge of flood control there” (Richman, “Hurricane Katrina: Government versus the Private Sector,” The Freeman, Oct. 2005, p. 5).

n      Wal-Mart to the Rescue! 

The superiority of private charities to government – in terms of both effectiveness and justice – has been epitomized by the splendid aid provided by Wal-Mart, a company that’s now the target of unfair and scurrilous attacks by labor-union thugs and their socialist allies. 

Beginning two days after Katrina hit, Wal-Mart delivered into the devastated Gulf region $20 million in cash donations, 1,500 truckloads of free merchandise, food for 100,000 meals, and the promise of a job for every one of its displaced workers.  Even the left-liberal Washington Post acknowledged on Sept. 6 that the company’s “unrivaled” relief effort “has turned the chain into an unexpected lifeline for much of the Southeast.  . . . While state and federal officials have come under harsh criticism for their handling of the storm’s aftermath, Wal-Mart is being held up as a model for logistical efficiency and nimble disaster planning, which have allowed it to quickly deliver staples such as water, fuel, and toilet paper to thousands of evacuees.”  If the government “would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis,” Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard said during an interview on “Meet the Press.” 

Would that the American Red Cross had been even a fraction as effective as Wal-Mart, but there’s abundant evidence (including anecdotal evidence from volunteers who worked for the Red Cross in the Gulf region) that the organization was grossly inefficient and incompetent in its relief efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi.  Perhaps the Red Cross has become government-like in its bureaucracy.  People who want to help Hurricane Katrina victims ought to resist the impulse to contribute money to the Red Cross and instead patronize their local Wal-Mart store!

 n      America’s Broken “Moral Levees” 

Conservative commentator Thomas Sowell, in a provocative September 11 column, suggested that the physical devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina “has painfully revealed the moral devastation of our times,” which led to mass looting in New Orleans and even to shots being fired at helicopters that were trying to rescue people.  Sowell contrasted the ugliness of these recent events with what happened 40 years ago, when an electric grid failure plunged New York and other Northeastern cities into a long blackout:  then, “law and order prevailed.  Ordinary citizens went to intersections to direct traffic.  People helped each other.  After the blackout was over, this experience left many people with an upbeat spirit about their fellow human beings.” 

What has happened in the past 40 years to explain the apparent breakdown of decency in New Orleans?  Sowell believes the answer lies in “a wider degeneration in American society in recent decades,” the breakdown of “moral traditions.”  I disagree with Sowell’s assessment here:  the traditional Judeo-Christian morality to which he alludes has failed not because of “the rhetoric of the intelligentsia,” or modern “situational ethics,” “postmodern philosophy,” and all the other things he – and his fellow social conservatives – complain about.  Rather, that traditional morality has failed because it is, and for a very long time has been, out of touch with human reality – not just today, but from its very beginnings in Western society.  But Sowell is correct in suggesting that the 20^th-century welfare state has played a critical role in undermining morality – and particularly the concept of personal responsibility upon which all rational moral codes depend.  Noting that many people in New Orleans were angry at government officials “for not having rescued them sooner, or taken care of them better, or for letting law and order break down,” Sowell suggests that “maybe the reason we are so often disappointed with them is that they have over-promised and we have been gullible enough to believe them.   Government cannot solve all our problems, even in normal times,” much less in times of catastrophe.  Sowell is right about this.  In emergencies, however, neither should people have to depend on altruistic acts of others – Sowell’s suggestion, which is only slightly better than dependence on government bureaucrats.  Rather, people should take responsibility for themselves.  Sowell’s “moral traditions” of altruism are just as liable as the welfare-state mentality for undermining that basic moral truth.  His final point, nevertheless, is valid:  “New Orleans can be rebuilt and the levees around it shored up.  But can the moral levees be shored up, not only in New Orleans but across America?”  (Sowell, “America’s broken ‘moral levees’ require rebuilding after ugliness, anarchy in New Orleans,” Detroit News, Sept. 11, 2005).

n      Where’s the “Exit Strategy” for This War? 

Critics of the war in Iraq keep harping on the presumed lack of an “exit strategy” by the Bush administration, for withdrawing U.S. troops.  Yet many of those same critics have been silent about an even longer, and far more expensive, “war” that the U.S. has been fighting for 40 years, with absolutely no “exit strategy”:  the so-called “War on Poverty” declared by former President Lyndon B. Johnson, as part of his “Great Society” buildup of the federally-funded welfare state.  After the federal government has spent literally trillions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money for welfare payments, food stamps, public housing, job training, and education since 1965, poverty remains.  And in many respects, New Orleans – with its high unemployment rate and large number of poor persons who have become dependent on government welfare payments  -- had epitomized the failure of the welfare state.  (Indeed, for many of the Katrina refugees, being forced to flee the city in which they had been trapped in a cycle of dependence on government and being given the opportunity to make lives of their own in other locations across the USA, may have been – ironically – the most fortunate thing that ever happened to them.) 

We now know – thanks to some recent scholarship (such as Jim Powell’s splendid book FDR’s Folly (2003)) – that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s much-touted New Deal programs in the 1930s did not help America’s recovery from the Great Depression; rather, they exacerbated and prolonged it. 

Apparently Democratic politicians are unwilling or unable to learn these clear lessons from history.  In Katrina’s wake, former vice presidential nominee John Edwards (who’s now director of the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina) called for a return to Depression-era programs to rebuild the Gulf Coast.   And Teddy Kennedy wants a Gulf Coast Redevelopment Authority modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority.  That’s right:  the Senatorial windbag who’s so critical of President Bush’s policy in Iraq is totally oblivious to the failure of his own political party’s decades-long “War on Poverty” and wants to continue that far more expensive failure.  With leadership like this, it’s no wonder that the Democratic Party is so intellectually bankrupt.

n      It Takes a Hurricane 

President Bush and Congress have used emergency powers to waive some federal regulations, in an effort to cut red tape and speed relief to victims of Hurricane Katrina.  Among other things, the Labor Department waived for three months “affirmative action” rules requiring companies to hire women, racial minorities, and disabled workers; the EPA extended a waiver allowing the use of higher-sulfur fuel to alleviate gas shortages nationwide; the IRS granted relief to residents in the affected areas, giving them until Oct. 31 to pay taxes without incurring penalties or interest; the Transportation Department temporarily waived safety rules limiting work hours for truck drivers and airline pilots who carry goods related to relief efforts; and the Department of Education has proposed offering an estimated 372,000 displaced schoolchildren in Louisiana and Mississippi up to $7,500 each in emergency school vouchers that could be used "wherever they are enrolled,” at public or private schools.  (Although President Bush initially suspended the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act (requiring workers on federal construction projects to receive union wages), the administration caved in to political pressure and reversed its waiver.  See my discussion of Bush’s “flip-flop” on Davis-Bacon in my Oct. 31 entry, “Tricks and Treats.”) 

Apparently, it takes a hurricane – and the resulting “emergency” situations – for the federal government to adopt sensible policies and to suspend foolish regulations that ought not to have policies in the first place.  One of the most positive results of these emergency waivers may be the use of school vouchers.  “We shouldn’t need a catastrophe on the scale of Katrina before folks like Ted Kennedy stop obstructing educational freedom in the U.S.  But maybe that’s what it takes to get some politicians to think anew,” the Wall Street Journal editors observed on October 14.   Although Kennedy still opposes vouchers, he may have softened his stance.  Other Democratic politicians who previously opposed school choice – including Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and even Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, a longtime voucher opponent – have said they’d support vouchers on a temporary basis.   Last month, the Louisiana legislature voted to let the state effectively take over the New Orleans public school system.  And the state plans to turn a significant number of the city’s underperforming schools (90 percent of the city’s public schools were performing below the state average) over to universities and foundations, to reopen as charter schools.  New Orleans may turn out to be the nation’s greatest experiment in school choice.  As economist Milton Friedman, who pioneered in proposing school vouchers 50 years ago, noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Louisiana policy makers now have a magnificent opportunity to correct the failings of government monopoly schools.  “Rather than simply rebuild the destroyed schools, Louisiana . . . should take this opportunity to empower the consumers, i.e., the students, by providing parents with vouchers,” which they would be free to use to choose the schooling they consider best for their children.  (Friedman, “The Promise of Vouchers,” W.S.J., Dec. 5).

n      The Value of Gun Rights 

With one of the highest murder rates in the country, New Orleans has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the USA.  The flood that followed Katrina didn’t help.  Within hours of the hurricane’s landfall, looters had begun breaking into stores and houses.  Some police officers abandoned their posts, while others joined the looting spree.  For several days, those who stayed on the job did not act to stop the looting that was going on right in front of them.  Those homes or businesses that were saved were protected in large part by the good citizens of New Orleans who defended them with their own firearms. 

Remarkably, notwithstanding these facts, government officials in New Orleans – the same officials who refused to protect the public from criminals – turned on the law-abiding citizens themselves and began a concerted effort to confiscate their guns.  On the orders of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, the New Orleans Police Department, the National Guard, the Oklahoma National Guard, and the U.S. Marshalls Service began breaking into homes at gunpoint, confiscating lawfully owned firearms, and evicting the residents.  “No one is allowed to be armed,” said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police.  “Guns will be taken.  Only law enforcement will be allowed to have guns.”    

A week after the confiscations began, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) filed a joint lawsuit in federal court, challenging the illegal order prohibiting firearms possession.  Attorneys for Orleans Parish (New Orleans) and St. Tammany Parish (which also confiscated guns) capitulated, under the judge’s threat that he would issue a preliminary injunction against them.  “The parishes and the plaintiffs signed a consent decree in which the parishes asserted (implausibly) that there was never an official government policy of confiscating guns, and also admitted that they had no authorization to confiscate guns pursuant to Louisiana’s emergency powers statute.  The parties agreed to accept that the court’s injunction forbids them from confiscating guns, and orders them to return all guns which have been confiscated,” David Kopel (research director of the Independence Institute) reported in the December issue of Reason magazine.  Kopel adds that what happened in New Orleans shows “an awful truth”: “There is no shortage of police officers and National Guardsmen who will illegally threaten peaceful citizens at gunpoint and confiscate their firearms.”  But it also shows some “noble truths”: “that citizens with firearms will defend law and order even when the government fails”; and “that our federal courts, as well as civil rights organizations such as NRA and SAF, continue to play an important role in defending constitutional rights against the depredations of lawless ‘law enforcement’ officers.” (Kopel, “Defenseless on the Bayou,” Reason, Dec. 2005, p. 30). 

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has noted, aptly, that the situation in New Orleans “represents a complete vindication of everything we’ve been saying in defense of the Second Amendment”:  “All throughout history, what you have in the aftermath of disasters like Katrina is mayhem, looting, robbing, raping, and killing by evildoers, along with a complete breakdown of government’s ability to protect people from those who would do them harm.  That’s exactly what the Right to Keep and Bear Arms was intended to address.  The Second Amendment is the underpinning of citizens’ efforts to stay alive. . . . The lesson of New Orleans is that citizens must be able to rely on their own ability to survive.  The answer once and for all to politicians who say Americans don’t need the Second Amendment, government will protect you, the answer forevermore is New Orleans.”  (“Turning Tragedy into Travesty,” America’s 1^st Freedom [NRA magazine], November 2005, pp. 36-37).

n      Racism, Real and Imagined 

In an interesting USA Today cover story (“Views of whites, blacks differ starkly on disaster,” Sept. 13), a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll revealed a stark racial divide in people’s opinions about the Katrina aftermath:  6 in 10 black Americans said that the fact that most hurricane victims were poor and black was one reason the federal government failed to come to the rescue more quickly, while nearly 9 in 10 white Americans said that poverty and race weren’t factors.  The paper noted, rather obviously if not ominously, “The racial divide – which underscores the different perspectives whites and blacks have on some aspects of life in America – could affect the debate over addressing poverty and rebuilding the Gulf Coast in the hurricane’s wake.” 

The racial divide in this poll is reminiscent of similar polls taken at the time of O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial, which revealed that a large number of black Americans thought Simpson innocent of the murder charges while most white Americans considered him guilty.  At the time, pundits explained the disparity by suggesting that Simpson benefited from black Americans’ distrust of the police – a factor that probably explains the jury’s verdict of acquittal.  Just as at that time, one might ask whether the rationale of “different perspectives” is sufficient to explain why there’s so strong a racial polarity – and why, in the eyes of many white Americans, so many black Americans seem blind to the facts of reality.  In the Simpson case, those facts were the overwhelming evidence presented at trial of Simpson’s guilt – evidence that subsequently supported the civil jury’s award of wrongful-death damages.  In the case of the New Orleans disaster, the facts include not only the failure of local and state government officials to do their duty responsibly (as noted above) but also the failure of New Orleans itself, with a significantly large portion of its citizenry having become wards of the state, dependent on government for their subsistence.   In response, many people (particularly left-liberals, both black and white alike) would argue that to make such arguments is itself “racist.” 

As with so many other public-policy issues in America, the “racism” charge is simplistic and misleading.  Notwithstanding the peculiar definition many so-called “civil rights” activists would give to the term (a definition that, by implying that only white persons are racist, is itself guilty of racism), perhaps the best definition was given by philosopher Ayn Rand, who described racism as “the notion of ascribing moral, social, or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage – the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.”  Rand called racism “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism,” for it means, in practice, that “a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the character and actions of a collective of ancestors.” 

Rand is right, both in her definition of racism and in her identification of the only true antidote to it:  the philosophy of individualism.  As applied to the New Orleans disaster “blame game,” the philosophy of individualism provides a clear answer to the question, Who’s at fault? – Each individual is ultimately responsible for his or her own life.  Anyone who tries to fix the blame on anyone else – whether a private citizen or a government official – is engaged in so great a perversion of reality and morality that “racism” (whether real or imagined) is the least of his problems.

n      Environmentalist Fear-Mongers 

It’s becoming increasingly clear that radical environmentalists are fanatics, out of touch with reality, with a blind religious-like faith in their apocalyptic beliefs.  And, like other fanatics, they are shameless in their willingness to propagate, at any cost, the myths on which their movement is based.  It was not surprising, therefore, to see environmentalists exploit hurricane Katrina and the resulting disaster in New Orleans, claiming that the disaster was “caused” by “global warming” – and to continue to assert their claim, as Germany’s environmental minister, Jurgen Trittin did, that the USA’s “climate-polluter” policies were responsible for both. 

As the editors of USA Today noted on September 26, however, “the science backing a link between global warming and devastating storms is preliminary, skimpy, and contradicted by many experts.”  Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, has noted that science does not support a link between global warming and recent hurricane activity; hurricanes Katrina and Rita were part of a natural cycle.  William Gray, a hurricane expert at Colorado State University, has noted that the increase in number and intensity of storms since 1995 is hardly unprecedented:  two major hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast only six weeks apart in 1915, too.  If global warming were to blame for recent storms, there should have been more typhoons in the Pacific and Indian oceans since 1995, Gray said.  Instead, there has been a slight decrease – at the same time China and India have increased their industrial output and emissions of greenhouse gases.  And as Marlo Lewis (senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) observed in a Sept. 29 letter to the editors, the increasing frequency of hurricane activity in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico since 1995 is due to a natural, multidecadal shift in the Atlantic “thermophaline circulation”; and the intensity of Katrina was due to natural weather patterns.  “Any tropical storm traversing waters of 82 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer has the potential to become a category 4 or 5.  Gulf waters routinely exceed that temperature in August, and did so long before mankind began using fossil fuels.”  As the USA Today editors concluded, “Blaming Katrina and Rita on global warming just adds to the hot air surrounding the issue.”

n      It All Depends on Who “We” Is 

On September 15, the same day President Bush, in a speech to the nation set against the backdrop of New Orleans’ historic Jackson Square, announced a massive, $200-billion-plus federal government plan for Katrina relief, the USA Today printed an interesting feature article about how the city of Galveston, Texas recovered after 1900, when it was razed by a hurricane even more ferocious than Katrina.  The September 1900 hurricane is still the deadliest in U.S. history:  it was a Category 4 hurricane that killed between 8,000 and 12,000 people and leveled 12 city blocks in Galveston.  “Galvestonians burned their dead, cleared the debris, and rebuilt with dazzling energy and boldness,” the article reported.  They built a mighty concrete seawall – 17 feet high, 16 to 20 feet thick at the base, nearly 10.5 miles long – with a concave shape, so waves would break upward and back onto themselves.  City leaders also decided to raise the entire grade of the city to 12-15 feet elevation.  The project took eight years and was financed by bonds underwritten by Galveston itself, along with tax relief from the state.  When another monster hurricane came, in 1915, the city was ready: only 8 people died, and damage was relatively limited.  “The 1900 storm was a historic opportunity to change Galveston’s vulnerability to hurricanes forever with an engineering project so vast, it was breathtaking.”  (Alcestis “Cooky” Oberg, “Lessons from Galveston,” USA Today, Sept. 15). 

The author of the USA Today piece suggested that a similar opportunity now exists for New Orleans:  “Officials could change its bowl-like topography and raise the grade of its new neighborhoods much higher, as Galveston did.  New Orleans might forbid rebuilding some neighborhoods at all and give them back to the marshes and swamps they came from.  A new transportation system could carry residents to higher, safer suburbs farther away, reducing the population allowed to live in the city.  Perhaps Baton Rouge and New Orleans could merge into one metropolitan entity, offering both pleasure to tourists and safety to residents.”  

“We have a historic opportunity to rebuild New Orleans better safer – to change its shape, the location of its neighborhoods, even its topography.”  Like Galveston, the city could adapt and thrive after a devastating storm.  The question remains, however, Who is We? Who should have the primary responsibility for rebuilding the city – the people of the United States as a whole, represented by the officials of the national government, or like Galveston in 1900, the people of the city itself, supported by their state government? 

Galveston was not unique:  until fairly recently in American history, cities have recovered from major disasters – disasters that in their scope equaled if not exceeded that of New Orleans – on their own, with a combination of largely private funding supplemented by local or perhaps state government funding.  That was how Chicago recovered from its Great Fire of 1871 (which killed 300 people, destroyed 18,000 buildings, left 100,000 Chicagoans without homes, and caused some $3.2 billion in damages, at today’s prices).  It was also how San Francisco recovered after it was leveled by an earthquake, and then burned by the resulting fires, in 1906.  And when a dam burst in Johnstown, Pa. in 1889, unleashing 20 million tons of water on the town’s residents (killing over 2,000 and leaving some 25,000 survivors without food or shelter), private relief poured in from across the nation:  the New York Stock Exchange pledged $20,000, the United States Brewery Association sent $10,000.  Cincinnatians donated 20,000 pounds of ham; prisoners of a Pittsburg penitentiary baked 1,000 loaves of bread.  Pennsylvania’s governor created a state relief commission to coordinate cleanup and restoration, while the state militia kept order.  Most importantly, the area’s biggest employer, the Cambria Iron Works, announced that it would reopen.  In July 1889, a little more than a month after the flood, one could buy ice cream for the Independence Day celebration on the streets of Johnstown.  (“Will New Orleans Rebound?” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 1). 

As Stephen Moore noted in a Sept. 19 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Conspicuously missing from the post-Katrina spending debate is a question for some brave soul in Congress to ask, What is the appropriate and constitutional role here for the federal government?  Before the New Deal taught us that the federal government is the solution to every malady, most congresses and presidents would have concluded that the federal government’s role was minimal.  One of our greatest presidents, Democrat Grover Cleveland, vetoed an appropriation for drought victims because there was no constitutional authority to spend for such purposes,” Moore reported, adding “Today he would be ridiculed by Ted Kennedy as `incompassionate.’”  Citing the examples of Chicago, San Francisco, and Galveston, Moore wrote, “In each instance, these proud cities were rebuilt rapidly and to even greater glory – with hardly any federal money.”  (Moore, “Welcome to the GOP’s New New Deal,” W.S.J., Sept. 19, 2005, p. A17).

n      “Not Yours To Give” 

Today’s policymakers – including that hypothetical “brave soul” in Congress that Stephen Moore mentioned – would do well to learn the lesson about the constitutional limitations on federal powers taught by the legendary Davy Crockett (1786-1836), the fabled Tennessee frontiersman and martyr at the battle of the Alamo, who served briefly in Congress during Andrew Jackson’s presidency. 

A perhaps-apocryphal story told by a 19^th-century Crockett biographer, tells of a speech that Crockett gave in the U.S. House of Representatives, in debating a bill to appropriate money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer (one of the many “private bills” that, unfortunately, often typified 19^th-century Congressional legislation).  Crockett, who was a principled Jacksonian Democrat, opposed the bill on the grounds that “Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity.”  He said that members of Congress, “as individuals,” certainly have the right to “give away as much of our own money as we please in charity,” but that as members of Congress they “have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money.”  Later, when asked by a friend why he had opposed the appropriation, Crockett explained that his principles had been strengthened by a constituent, Horatio Bunce, who had upbraided him for voting for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to relieve fire victims in Georgetown.  As Crockett explained it, Mr. Bunce reminded him that “the power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be intrusted to man,” and that therefore the Constitution limits that power:  “The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things.  To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else.  Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.” 

The Democratic Party in the 19^th century, when the party was still faithful to its radical Jeffersonian/Jacksonian roots, advocated limited government:  it interpreted the power-granting clauses of the U.S. Constitution fairly strictly, limiting the federal government to those powers enumerated in the text; and it opposed, as unconstitutional and unjust “class legislation,” any proposals to use the powers of government to grant special benefits on any groups – no matter how “needy” those groups may be or how beneficial those special privileges to some might, arguably, be to society as a whole.   How far that Party – and the American people as a whole – have departed from our country’s founding principles!

 n      Assumption of Risk 

Beyond the constitutional question is a moral question:  Who ought to be responsible for the costs of rebuilding New Orleans – American taxpayers as a whole, or those who assumed the risks of living in an area vulnerable to floods?  The traditional tort-law doctrine of “assumption of risk” provides the obvious answer. 

The biggest single cause of the Katrina and Rita disasters, arguably, is the existence of the National Flood Insurance Program, the unwise government policy that encourages people to live in flood-vulnerable areas like the Gulf coast.  Started in 1968 (another failed program from the LBJ era), federal flood insurance subsidizes development in coastal areas and other regions subject to flooding by offering insurance at bargain rates underwritten by the government.  As of last year, about 4.6 million policies were in effect with an average annual premium of $438 – nowhere near enough to cover the program’s losses.  In early September, “Congress authorized the program to borrow $3.5 billion for Katrina-related payments, an amount most experts believe is just the beginning and few believe will be repaid by property owners,” USA Today reported on September 21.  As the paper’s editors noted, “The program not only brings big government into an area better left to private enterprise, it also achieves the opposite of its goal.  By lowering the cost of maintaining a home on flood-prone lands, it increases the populations in these areas.  That in turn leads to more, and more costly, disasters. . . . After 37 years, it’s time to recognize federal flood insurance for what it is: a disaster.”  Congress should follow the recommendation of David Maurstad, acting director of FEMA’s mitigation division, that flood insurance subsidies should be phased out.  FEMA’s latest estimate is that it could be $23 billion in the red for more than 225,000 flood claims from Katrina and Rita.  (“FEMA official: End subsidies for flood insurance,” USA Today, Oct. 19.) 

n      Let the Good Times Roll! 

To close on a positive note, it’s noteworthy that, slowly but surely, New Orleans is recovering from the devastation of the post-Katrina flood.   Tourists’ favorite part of the city, the French Quarter, was largely undamaged by flood waters, as it sits on higher ground than other parts of New Orleans, and so has come back into something like business as usual.  For example, Café Du Monde reopened in mid-October, and is once again serving its famous beignets and chicory-laced coffee. 

It’s also worth emphasizing that the people of New Orleans are proceeding with plans for Mardi Gras 2006.   And some city officials are considering selling the rights to be “official sponsor” of the next Mardi Gras for $2 million, as a story in today’s Wall Street Journal reports.  Although traditionalists will object, the move to corporate sponsorship is one of the changes that are necessary, as a matter of economic reality, not only to save Mardi Gras but also the city itself.   

The Mardi Gras season starts Feb. 18 and will include parades of more than 25 krewes, according to city officials.  In typical New Orleans style, Hurricane Katrina is likely to be featured prominently:  the Krewe du Vieux, known for its irreverence, has announced that its 2006 theme will be “C’est Levee.”

 | Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday, December 7, 2005 | Copyright © David N. Mayer