Among politicians and commentators now sorting out the New Orleans disaster, discussion seems to be focused on the current administration. While the contribution of the war-crazed Right is to continue to ignore the nakedness of the emperor, the Left utilizes the catalogue of administration gaffs to argue its agenda?which mainly consists of "elect us." Yet while debate rages seemingly in earnest, the politicians and the media are taking their cues from an ancient script that reads thus: tainted public officials will be fired (so long, Mike Brown), levees will be fixed, funding for some key government programs will be increased, and new ones may even be started. Then, satisfied with our "progress," we will join hands and celebrate a government fully prepared to prevent the catastrophe that happened two weeks ago. Meanwhile I am endlessly puzzled; how can the state use a disaster it created to persuade people to place their faith in the state?
For those unconvinced that the state, and not Katrina, caused the disaster, I will offer my synopsis, beginning with the New Orleans levee and drainage system. To read the remarks of experts who studied the levees long before Katrina hit, one would think they had been designed to submerge large sections of the New Orleans area beneath a stagnant pool contaminated with sewage and debris. But since the Army Corps of Engineers and the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board are government agencies under no direct pressure to serve anyone besides the bureaucrats they take orders from, nothing was done. And tragically, the levees, and not Katrina itself, created the mess that befell New Orleans. Wrote The New York Times on August 31, "It was not the water from the sky but the water that broke through the city's protective barriers that had changed everything for the worse. . . When the levees gave way in some critical spots, streets that were essentially dry in the hours immediately after the hurricane passed were several feet deep in water on Tuesday morning."
In the days following the storm the government seemed to adopt a strict plan: help criminals, obstruct honest citizens. When armed looters filled the streets and overwhelmed police, New Orleans' finest either stood idly by or joined in sacking the city.
Meanwhile, FEMA remained idle until Thursday, three days after the hurricane passed, when its lead bureaucrat Mr. Brown appeared on television to announce that his agency would begin helping New Orleans very soon.
When it finally did arrive to "manage" the crisis, it spent most of its energy redirecting desperately needed supplies and preventing people from trying to rescue friends and family. Case in point: the grief-stricken president of Jefferson Parish, one of the local communities, appeared on "Meet the Press" to detail how on separate occasions FEMA stopped deliveries of three trailers full of water from Wal-Mart and one thousand gallons of diesel fuel from the Coast Guard. Next, FEMA cut the community's emergency communication lines without notice and posted an armed guard to prevent anyone from going near them. Finally, after offering daily assurances that a co-worker's grandmother, trapped in a nearby nursing home, would be rescued, FEMA failed to follow through and the woman was allowed to drown in the flood. The area is full of similar stories.
I don't mean to suggest that our government is actively sabotaging its citizens, although that may seem to be the case. The problem, much more subtle, is that the government itself is rarely held accountable and therefore has no reason to care. Businesses that provide lousy service or kill and injure customers and bystanders soon suffer the consequences of the market and cease to exist. Government, on the other hand, is strangely immune to market forces. When the state fails, a few figureheads (Bush or Brown, for instance) may suffer criticism or lose their jobs, but the state itself is never questioned. Instead it is rewarded with more funding and more control.
As the implacable libertarian Lew Rockwell repeatedly points out, it is no wonder that an institution that has learned to thrive on its own crimes spends billions upon billions in taxpayer dollars but can't build a reliable space shuttle, educate its children, fend off a few extremists with an agenda, or maintain its levees.