Katrina...a year later

Reading and listening to the news, you couldn't miss the rehash that the press is doing on last year's Katrina. Specifically what happened in New Orleans. All of the other cities and communities along the gulf (like those in Mississippi), some of which suffered much more damage than N.O. or were totally obliterated, don't even show up on the radar...as if they never existed. Also specifically, the focus is on Katrina as evidence of a failure of Federal Government spending. Robert Tracinski at Real Clear Politics writes that they may in fact be correct in this criticism, but not in the way that they and the critics on the left think.


"Frank Rich and company claimed that people were trapped in New Orleans because they had been abandoned for decades by a stingy government that denied them an adequate level of welfare handouts. In fact, New Orleans received a higher per-capita rate of federal welfare spending than most cities--a full 78 percent more than the national average--and the districts hardest hit by the flooding contained some of the city's largest public housing projects. The welfare state had showered its largesse on New Orleans, but with what result?
In fact, the disaster in New Orleans was caused, not by too little welfare spending, but by too much. Four decades of dependence on government left people without the resources--economic, intellectual, or moral--to plan ahead and provide for themselves in an emergency. I stated the lesson at the time:
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men....
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them--this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects. "


The full article can be found here.