How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

Michael Parenti writes How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced warning that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just as the free market dictates, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. This is the way the invisible hand works its wonders.

There would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island last year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million people, more than 10 percent of the country's population, with not a single life lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.

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Emphasis Mine

Capitalism: property first, then people.

Communism: people first, then property.

Your choice.

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The Storm after the Storm

David Brooks writes about The Storm After the Storm. He is chiefly worried about the social upheaval that may come after the disaster happening in New Orleans. His thesis is:

Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history, it's striking how often political turbulence followed.

And he concludes that:

Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

In other words, the African-Americans are going to explode over the treatment of the poor in New Orleans.

The rich folks got away to safety. The poor were left to die.

And people say that class warfare is dead. The rich wage it every single day.

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Racial Slur

The media is doing more racial sluring than John Brodgen ever did by continually repeating a racial slur against Ms Carr. This makes them an accomplice to the slur. I should expect the editors and newsreaders to follow Mr. Brodgen's lead and resign in disgrace.

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