Pondering Bellona
The news from Louisiana is overwhelming. The Making Light crew has been providing superb coverage, as have others. The loss and ruin of lives staggers; the destruction of property (property is solidified dream) dismays; the bungling of authorities inspires anger. Worst of all is the certain knowledge that this will end neither soon nor well. I don’t know what to do.
One thing that does seem obvious to me is a view that does not seem to be universally shared: Everybody should feel chastened by events. Every level of authority has failed those trapped in New Orleans. Members of both establishment political parties have disgraced themselves. Nor has the “spontaneous organization” we libertarians worship come through. Whether you’re an anarcho-capitalist, a statist, a liberal or a conservative, your institution of choice has proven inadequate to the task. A Republican administration gutted the long-term funding needed to shore up southern Louisiana’s flood barrier, scattered our emergency first-responders on a global fool’s errand and has “managed” a relief effort of stupefying incompetence. Louisiana’s Democratic politicians lifted no finger to get the poor black residents whose votes keep them in office to safety prior to the storm. They even, by closing the Greyhound station Saturday for instance, acted to impede their flight.
If you believe in “democracy,” it was your god that brought forth the administration that gutted the Clinton White House’s quite good plan for flood preparedness for the region. If you believe in the federal government as superior in wisdom to the states, as the proper guardian of national concerns, the mote in its eye prevented it from seeing its duty here. If you’re a federalist who believes in the superiority of the levels of government “closest to the people,” you’re faced with state and local governments that failed to fill the breach left by federal dereliction, even though their citizens were most affected by the delta’s declining water stability. If you believe that all that is needed is for government to get out of the way, it’s not just the potshots at looters or the people grabbing not food but jewelry from shattered storefronts that most dismays, it’s the apparent absence of effective, “bottom-up” coordination among the trapped.
There is more than plenty of blame to go around. I’m not saying “Everybody’s equally at fault, man, so like nobody is.” From what I can tell, in timeline terms, the federal government in general and the Bush Administration in particular are most culpable for the failures of the years prior to the disaster; the city and state of New Orleans most to blame for the days immediately prior to the hurricane, and the Bush Administration and cursed human nature for the days since. The helicopter-eye view: a spectacular failure of anarchy and government both.
Comment by Avram —
September 1, 2005 @ 8:42 pm
If you believe in “democracy,†it was your god that brought forth the administration that gutted the Clinton White House’s quite good plan for flood preparedness for the region.
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Mmm, not so much. Certainly not in 2000, arguably not in ‘04 either. Leaving aside questions of cheating and vote fraud, the Electoral College was created as a counter to democracy, not an incarnation of it.
Comment by Leonard —
September 1, 2005 @ 8:50 pm
What if I believe what is needed is for “government” (meaning: the state) to get out the way, and to be known to be incapable of doing anything for a long enough period (let’s say, tens of years) so that local organization must step up?
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Building a city on sinking land is inherently a problematic thing. In a delta, you either let the land flood, or it sinks away. Democracy has chosen to levee the Mississippi all the way from the Gulf to Minnesota, thereby causing any floods which do break through to be catastrophic. I suspect this system would not have have happened without the Federal state. It’s very espensive, and could never have been proved to be a good idea. (We now know it was a bad idea.)
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My suspicion about New Orleans and the Mississippi is that in a free market, they would have never built the massive levee system that has helped to cause this flood. Much of LA would flood, every hurricane, but they’d have (not) built to deal with it. It would be more rural. New Orleans itself would be levee’d off, and still be sinking, of course, and would have very high insurance rates that would discourage sprawl. But its levees would not be challenged even by a storm of this magnitude since there would be plenty of other places for water to go.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 1, 2005 @ 8:51 pm
I have to think this particular quibble is “outside the scope of our enquiry.” Under a more direct democracy than we . . . enjoy? there’s no guarantee that the decent, Clinton-era plans exist in the first place.
Comment by Bill —
September 1, 2005 @ 8:51 pm
Pondering Bellona
I too thought of Dhalgren and Bellona as I have become aware of what is happening in New Orleans.
Good post, Jim
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 1, 2005 @ 8:52 pm
Above for Avram. Crossed Leonard. Leonard, I’m about to read your comment.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 1, 2005 @ 8:59 pm
It was something on either NPR or a weblog that really put the Dhalgren connection in my mind, Bill. It was about how, in all this era of mass communication, with power out, TV out, cell phone batteries dying and radios failing, that folks in the affected area really are losing their media “feelers.” That hooked up with the mention in the novel about how Bellona had supposedly fallen out of American popular consciousness when the TVs stopped working, or some such.
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That and worrying if NoLa’s residents are trapped in a mobius strip . . .
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The disjunction is that in the novel, we see Bellona after it’s undergone a transformation whose early stages must have looked much like New Orleans now, in terms of social disorder. I mean, along with the Mars business. But during the Kid’s chronicle, a good enough spontaneous order of the sort Leonard (and I!) might hope for has had time to arise.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 1, 2005 @ 9:04 pm
Leonard, some excellent points. But does the actual behavior of the existing people not discommode you at all? Sow the tiniest doubt?
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I mean, I’m seeing a massive failure of government. Somehow separated from the horror it entails I should find that comforting to my world view. But I’m not comforted, because I think it also challenges our hopes for voluntary cooperation. I’m perfectly willing to believe that a functioning anarchy could take “a long time” of the state getting out of the way, but if the long time looks like what you’ve called “mere anarchy,” I’m inclined to pronounce the transformation Not Worth It.
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At the same time, present events give no one any reason to embrace the state as our assurance against chaos.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 1, 2005 @ 9:21 pm
As a managerialist liberal, I see no failure of my preferred philosophy here. It is represented quite well by Clinton’s FEMA under Watt and the plans of that era. If America chooses to toss that away, that is America’s choice — a fundamentally unserious one, but I don’t think much of the current American electorate in any case.
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Nor do I think much of those Louisiana pols, Democratic or not. It was hardly a secret that the New Orleans police were the most corrupt in the nation. You needed only to look at their pay scales to see that without bribes, they basically couldn’t make ends meet. The local power structure permitted this situation to be maintained over a long period of time.
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And speaking of fundamentally unserious, aren’t we going to get any defense of the situation from some of the more ideological libertarians here? I mean, you’re seeing a perfectly unregulated free market in action. Shouldn’t aid be magically materializing through the invisible hand of the marketplace? Shouldn’t we be scorning those central planners who wanted to send out the hospital ships before the storm hit, not days afterwards?
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The whole predictable disaster is probably going to repeat itself on a larger scale when avian flu hits. If that happens, everyone who argued for lower taxes will be perfectly capable of using their private funds to make their own vaccine, I suppose.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 1, 2005 @ 10:06 pm
Rich, if you’re willing to own the moral hazard of encouraging hundreds of thousands of people to settle below sea-level in hurricane country – for managerial liberalism’s track record here goes back decades, you’re welcome to it. Is that managerial liberalism is great so long as it never ever loses an election? I agree that the Clinton Administration foresaw this calamity and had a reasonable plan for preventing it. Is it your argument that it foresaw all possible calamities and had reasonable plans for preventing all that could be prevented? Because otherwise you just got lucky.
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You’ve been around libertarians long enough that you should know that libertarians value all kinds of voluntary cooperation beyond cash nexus transactions. (And then there’s the various defenses of price gouging, with which I mostly concur, for the cash nexus itself.)
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I think it’s clear that all kinds of voluntary aid is materializing, not remotely magically, from outside the affected area. Especially in the context of the official bungling, this will be crucial to sustaining people and getting them back on their feet. Within the city itself, people are shellshocked, they lack resources, and they’ve been jerked around by authorities who have supplanted the survivors’ own agency. “Go to the Convention Center and wait. We’ll take care of you.”
Comment by T. J. Madison —
September 1, 2005 @ 10:06 pm
>>I mean, you’re seeing a perfectly unregulated free market in action. Shouldn’t aid be magically materializing through the invisible hand of the marketplace?
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Was there a perfectly unregulated free market on Friday? No. It takes time for people to adapt to the non-presence of traditional government. Note in this case there is the expectation that tradtional government will return, which further complicates matters.
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I should also point out that there was never any market accountablity for the flood control systems. Ideally, the levy systems would have been owned and operated by private companies who also provided flood insurance. This would have provided both proper accountablity and possible redundancy.
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“The federal government knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and then say, ‘If it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’” — Harry Browne
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Why are the page breaks broken for me?
Comment by Mark —
September 1, 2005 @ 10:15 pm
Leonard: My suspicion about New Orleans and the Mississippi is that in a free market, they would have never built the massive levee system that has helped to cause this flood.
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The levees “helped to cause this flood” by allowing New Orleans to be built in the first place. So Leonard’s solution is for there to not be a city there. Leonard, it looks like you got your wish.
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Of course we won’t rebuild the city, because it’ll just get destroyed again in a hundred years or so. And we won’t build cities in other areas susceptible to floods, hurricanes, tsunami, mudslides, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, lightning, or meteors.
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Jim, as a not-so-ideological libertarian, I’m the first to admit that storms that show up at random about every fifty years and wipe out entire cities are not going to be handled well by market forces. We’ll see how many insurance companies bleed to death once their clients are in a position to make claims; for now, I eagerly await stories of insurance companies sending bottled water and medical supplies to the Superdome.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 1, 2005 @ 10:31 pm
Mark, surely Leonard didn’t wish that the city would be destroyed with the attendant loss of life. But as to his alternate universe where New Orleans never attained its present dimensions because no government dug a big hole for people to live in beside the higher parts of the city, what’s so terrible about it? As to the insurance companies, honestly, I smell bailout.
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September 1, 2005 @ 10:32 pm
[...]
Thu Sep 01, 2005
Jim Henley Talking Sense
Jim Henley says what I’m feeling:
Every level of authority has failed those trapped i [...]
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 1, 2005 @ 10:50 pm
Jim, it’s a bit of a straw man to say that planning is no good unless all possible calamities are foreseen. The flooding of New Orleans was an obvious calamity, and it was foreseen. My contention is that there are many situations that require planning; you can’t just wait for the market to solve everything. Minarchist libertarianism has no role for this kind of governmental planning. For example, T.J. Madison’s suggestion of privately owned levees runs into well-known free ridership and public goods problems. In general, that whole strand of libertarianism is economically ignorant, as if people had never heard the phrase “market failure”.
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As for the moral hazard of encouraging people to settle below sea level in hurricane country — how exactly is a managerialist liberalism supposed to discourage people from long-settled but risky areas? Despite the pseudo category of “statism”, a liberal government is not a dictatorship. Sure, you can try to change policy to stop giving people money to rebuild in certain areas, but liberalism relies on votes, and you can’t stop people from voting to reward risky behavior that they like. And in any case there are very few places that are immune from disaster, and if you include global climate change and things like avian flu, none are. You have to plan to handle risk, not eliminate it.
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Leonard says that building a city like New Orleans is inherently problematic. Well, yes. But all of current civilization is inherently problematic. It doesn’t just run by itself. Without intervention, Leonard’s right that everything would be “more rural”; there would be a massive die off. That’s not a price that people are willing to pay for a simpler society.
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As for the “never losing an election” bit, the American system is predicated on the idea that people are generally responsible enough so that no matter which major political party wins, things won’t be too bad. That is no longer true, if it ever was. You can’t protect people from their own large-scale foolishness.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
September 1, 2005 @ 11:12 pm
Um, you know, Rich, some of those supposedly “economically ignorant” libertarians are actual economists who not only are aware of the free rider problems but have serious ideas for addressing them.
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And you speak of large-scale foolishness as if it came from nowhere, rather than from, say, people being lulled into a cognitive disconnect between actions and consequences by, among other things, the managerial-liberal welfare state.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 2, 2005 @ 12:05 am
I’ve never understood who is supposed to fund the bonus participants get if a dominant assurance contract fails. I suspect that this is one of those things, like pollution trading, that might be a good idea in certain circumstances if the size of government is increased in order to implement it. (Pollution trading systems require more government than command-and-control; you have to regulate and enforce an entire market in unreal goods.)
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As for large-scale foolishness being a result of the liberal welfare state, there’s a classic untestable assertion. It’s not even a correlation/causation confusion, because it requires a delay in between the establishment of a welfare state and large-scale foolishness. But I suggest that Europe, Canada, etc. are counterexamples to this suggestion of a general law.
Comment by Eric (the .5b) —
September 2, 2005 @ 12:54 am
I agree that the Clinton Administration foresaw this calamity and had a reasonable plan for preventing it.
Did they? I’ve been reading since the Clinton administration that a direct category 5 hurricane hit would be catastrophic for New Orleans. I’ve heard claims that another $250M would have prevented the levee failures that happened after Katrina only glanced the city, but nothing about that being enough to have taken it dead on.
Comment by Charles Hueter —
September 2, 2005 @ 1:00 am
Nor has the “spontaneous organization†we libertarians worship come through. Whether you’re an anarcho-capitalist, a statist, a liberal or a conservative, your institution of choice has proven inadequate to the task.
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I call foul on the anarcho-capitalist criticism because there wasn’t an AnCap institution in New Orleans to fail. Aggression in the form of government had long taken root there, making the city no fundamentally different from any other major metropolitan spot. The absence of aggression (the initiation of physical force) is, for me, the crucial defining aspect of the anarchy I support.
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And Mr. Henley, as you have no doubt noted in the past in regards to the Iraqi democratic castle-in-the-sand-building misadventures, you aren’t going to get a new political order without the widespread acceptance of the fundamental tenants of that order’s philosophy. Looters, murders, arsonists, rapists, vandals, and so on are not believers in property rights. Suddenly yanking the socio-economic carpet out from hundreds of thousands of people is not going to lead to anarcho-capitalism. It will lead to a lot of chaos or it will lead to some chaos and a lot of police state control.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
September 2, 2005 @ 1:19 am
And as for chastening, it depends on what you see. I can look at it just the same way you do, and what’s the chastening? Government being venal and incompetent at all levels and affiliations?. That’s part of why I’m not a statist. People being panicky, violent, selfish, and aggressive? That’s all of why I’m not an anarchist. (Spontaneous organization can happen, and when it does, it’s great, but too many libertarians have a childlike faith in it in all possible situations.) I could even go further and say this is absolutely the sort of failure of core duties to expect under governments that don’t focus on these duties, but instead provide an expansive state. Nothing about any of this chastens me – it’s just on the extremely depressing range of the outcomes I’m not surprised by.
However, I don’t think this is the whole story. I know this isn’t the whole story. I know a guy with the Red Cross in DC who’s either on his way to or in New Orleans right now. I know a small Texas town where all the city employees went shopping with their own money and spent hours cooking mass quantities of food when they realized the local hotels were filling up with hungry storm refugees.
The situation is horrendous, but there are people and groups doing what they can.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 2, 2005 @ 8:01 am
Eric (the .5b), in fact this wasn’t a direct Category 5 hurricane hit. It was a glancing Category 4 hit, and the plans to ameliorate it would have worked if they had been implemented. A glancing Cat 4 hit is more likely than a direct Cat 5 one. It seems like you’re extending a basic (and foolish) argument that goes “Why plan? If a meteor crashes into the Earth, we’ll all be dead anyway.”
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And voluntary charitable action is all very well, but it’s not adequate, and it is sentimentality to rejoice in it. When you get sick, do you go to a volunteer doctor? No, probably not, at least if you’re middle class. If New Orleans had had a real evacuation plan implemented before the hurricane hit, voluntary action could have been filling in the inevitable gaps that will always exist, rather than being a stopgap that evidently isn’t really helping the people still trapped in New Orleans.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 2, 2005 @ 8:56 am
It seems like you’re extending a basic (and foolish) argument that goes “Why plan? If a meteor crashes into the Earth, we’ll all be dead anyway.â€
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But Rich, even if that were what Eric were saying, it’s nothing but the flip side of the equally unpersuasive upcomment argument that “There’s risk anywhere you live, so you might as well build underwater in a hurricane zone with only some dikes to keep you dry.”
Comment by Jeremy Osner —
September 2, 2005 @ 9:09 am
N’awleans is a pretty old city — doesn’t it predate the existance of the liberal welfare state by a couple years? I’m quite ignorant of the history here — I was assuming the levees were built to protect existing development as the land sunk, not to clear new land for development. Like Venice was not built on platforms in a lake, the water came into an existing city.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 2, 2005 @ 9:19 am
Who made that upcomment argument? I didn’t see it. I did say that it is functionally impossible to convince people to move out of places like New Orleans — the location of which was not chosen by some planner somewhere — so that this “you might as well build” bit is silly. As Iraq illustrates, action has to take place within the limits of what is actually possible. It was politically impossible for any democratic government to have uprooted and relocated New Orleans. It might have been possible to redesign the flood control system to stop channeling the silt so that New Orleans wouldn’t lose its buffer wetlands protection. Environmentalists who I work with fought for that for a good long time, and lost. Too much infringement on private property rights and so on.
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The reason that planning wasn’t adequate was primarily race, I’d say. This is the South, and no local pol was going to make the same preparations to save poor black people as they would for white people. But, as with civil rights, that’s exactly why the Federal government is supposed to step in.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 2, 2005 @ 9:58 am
Oh yeah, one more interesting link on planning. Compare the size of the European and American oil reserves:
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http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=OBR&Date=20050902&ID=5082708
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And hope that the next comparison won’t be between the doses of Tamiflu per capita for Europe and the U.S.
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Reliance on the market under conditions of market failure can kill.
Comment by Charles Hueter —
September 2, 2005 @ 10:01 am
Government being venal and incompetent at all levels and affiliations?. That’s part of why I’m not a statist. People being panicky, violent, selfish, and aggressive? That’s all of why I’m not an anarchist.
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Eric, are all people always panicky, violent, selfish*, and aggressive? Like I said earlier: sudden catastrophic situations create chaos and if that chaos is not filled by a culture of liberty and responsibility, it’ll get filled by a culture of viciousness. Perhaps if you were arguing against Rothbard’s Magic Button you might have a legitimate point. But just because the element most likely to throw property rights out the window during a crisis has done so, does not mean the free market anarchist position is invalidated by the events in NOLA.
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*There is a gulf of difference between self-interest and greed. It should be acknowledged.
Comment by Leonard —
September 2, 2005 @ 10:05 am
Rich, you say that all of civilization is “problematic” and in a sense you are right – we all depend on the extended market order. Without it, we’d starve, we’d die of disease, we’d have no power, etc. etc. Bad bad. Civilization is good. I am surely for civilization and its ability to support vaste hordes of humans who’d not otherwise exist.
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However, when I said New Orleans was problematic, what I meant to say was that it is unusually, atypically problematic. In two ways.
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First, that it is reliant on the state to produce a highly important good for it, which the state does not produce for many other places. This is foolish in the highest degree, as we are seeing, because the state does not take into account many aspects of the situation when forming policy that the market would. Also the state is dumb as a rock, and tends to “learn” only after repeated failure. If you must have goods-provision by the state, you want it to be something which the state has lots of experience doing, like say, policing. They’ll do a bad job, but at least there will be ongoing and continual failures elsewhere (and adjustment/learning).
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Second, and more to my original meaning: putting a major city below sea level in the hurricane zone is unusually dangerous. Much more so, than, for example, relying on regular gasoline deliveries, dentists, or the abundant supply of long-distance bandwidth.
Comment by Ray —
September 2, 2005 @ 10:24 am
Who put the city there in the first place? Managerial liberal planners? Or individual citizens pursuing their own self-interested goals?
NO is the port of a massive river. Nobody was ordered to live there, its a natural site for commerce and trade. Once they had settled there, they got the govt to build levees. If there was no govt, they’d still be there, getting private corporations to build levees (and most likely wondering why the corporation’s 24-hour helpline has been disconnected)
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September 2, 2005 @ 10:28 am
[...] blem, with suggestions about what needs to be done to correct it. Jim Henley thinks that there’s enough blame to go around to everyone: Everybody should feel chastened [...]
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 2, 2005 @ 10:33 am
I understand your point, Leonard, but my point was that I think that libertarians underestimate the degree to which ordinary market operations would not work without a regulatory state. “Regular gasoline deliveries” are one of things that you cited; well, see the moneycentral link that I posted above. It is not profitable for any business to prepare for catastrophes that would affect regular gasoline deliveries, if for no other reason than when catastrophes happen, “property rights” are seen for the fiction that they are. (They are a generally useful fiction, don’t get me wrong.) The government should not always resort to things like price-fixing, but sometimes, as in WW II, it’s going to have to. Saying that it never should because of ideological reasons is throwing away human rationality in favor of a faith that things will always work out due to market mechanisms.
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Secondly, I’m really starting to disagree even more with the “putting a major city below sea level in the hurricane zone” language. No one put the city there; please remember the basic history of the Louisiana Purchase and so on. And no one could keep people from living there; just imagine the libertarian rage over a Kelo-like decision to buy people out and relocate them. So what are people supposed to do? Say that well, those people made a bad decision, let them die? How is that different than the Republicans blaming people for not getting out?
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In fact, planners did think of something to do. It wasn’t done. One of the reasons it wasn’t done is because of the anti-tax and anti-government ideology in the U.S. This is only one of many reasons for the political failure involved (racism, war mania, toxic Republican ideology that encourages disaster in order to take advantage of it, and theories of general government incompetence also play a part). But really, I don’t think that your objection is historically coherent.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 2, 2005 @ 10:54 am
Rich, I take your point regarding the evolution of metropolitan New Orleans. It’s a useful corrective. I would suggest three things, though. First, have you read Max’s post of a couple of days ago about the limits of the federal government as guarantor against this kind of catastrophe. Second, it appears that the worst levee breakage was in a section that WAS recently upgraded to current standards. Third, I think here as elsewhere your advocacy on behalf of managerialism elides the fact that managerial liberalism in itself can’t resolve conflicts in values. The notable ones here are environmental versus economic, among others. Plans to abate sinkage in NO mean saltwater intruding on freshwater elsewhere along the coast, for instance. Billmon’s long post of Wednesday about environmental degradation is well-taken, but it also implies a monumental conflict between keeping the delta habitable by humans and keeping it ecologically viable.
Comment by Avram —
September 2, 2005 @ 11:11 am
Last night I started a comment about how New Orleans predated the American Revolution, and how it was therefore foolish to blame it’s placement on the federal government, until I got to the part of Wikipedia’s entry on the city where it explains that the original city was mostly on high-points (above sea-level) surrounded by low-lying swampland until the early 20th century, A Baldwin Wood designed pumping systems to drain that land and make it habitable. The draining caused the ground to settle, lowering it even further below sea level.
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Now, in some alternate timeline where the American colonies broke loose from the UK but never formed a federal government, there would probably still be a New Orleans; that’s just a very handy place to put a port. What Jim and Leonard seem to be arguing is that in such a timeline, Wood’s draining project couldn’t have been implemented because there’d be no deep-pocketed federal government to pay for it by extracting tax money from the rest of the nation, and so New Orleans would be a much smaller city, mostly above sea level.
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I don’t know if this claim of theirs is true. There’d certainly be a monetary incentive to turning swampland into useable urban real estate if it could be done cheaply enough.
Comment by Leonard —
September 2, 2005 @ 11:38 am
Avram, right.
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In addition, although I don’t know how the insurance industry works in New Orleans, my guess is that there is state intrusion there, probably some sort of scheme to “insure” the companies against catastrophe via the taxpayer – that is to say, corporate welfare. Otherwise I simply cannot believe that any company would write a policy for 90% of the buildings there, at least, not a policy that would insure against hurricane effects. At least not without truly monumental premiums.
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Now, I recognize that a lot of individuals either don’t value insurance much (risk-lovers) or are just too stupid/uneducated to know its value. However, businesses are in general much more risk averse and much better informed. There is no way that New Orleans would be anywhere near the size it is, if no responsible business would locate itself there. And there is no way business would be there in the scale it is (or was) without insurance.
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As a libertarian, I know that the market is really, really good at solving problems, and the state, not so much. So when I see a truly vast fuckup (like a major city, submerged), I’m always willing to bet good money that state is behind it, usually in the form of unintended consequences. You have to understand that at one point, it seemed like a really good idea to “help” people “afford” insurance by “helping” insurance companies.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 2, 2005 @ 12:17 pm
Avram, I see no indication that A. Baldwin Wood was hired by the Federal government to drain that land. As far as I know, he was hired by New Orleans government. But in any case, cities grow, and I don’t know of any plausible way in which New Orleans could have traversed the 20th century without expanding into low-lying areas. As you say, it certainly would have been economically profitable in the short term for business to drain that land, even without governmental funds of any kind, and the long-term profitability of this land would not affect the businesses that did so, since they would sell it to people who demonstrably do not generally make calculations on those time scales. Any attempt to rectify this market failure through zoning, city planning, etc. is also not really a favored libertarian solution.
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Jim, I haven’t read MAx’s post, which Max? The section of that levee that broke was in fact not finished, from the editorandpublisher:
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“The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it’s too late.
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One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday. ”
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And yes, managerial liberalism can’t resolve conflicts in values. If people debated the problem and said “Go ahead, let New Orleans drown, we want to keep the barrier islands habitable by human beach houses” than all that managerial liberalism can do is say “OK”. But I really doubt that people ever said this.
Comment by Charles Hueter —
September 2, 2005 @ 12:27 pm
…when catastrophes happen, “property rights†are seen for the fiction that they are. (They are a generally useful fiction, don’t get me wrong.)
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There is a lot that could be written in response to that statement. One could be snarky and demand instant access to your home whenever they felt like it. One could be outraged and scream at you for abandoning/slandering a crucial principle in the operation of civilized society. I’ll say nothing reveals the true philosophy of an individual like a catastrophe.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 2, 2005 @ 12:32 pm
Perhaps we should find out if Rich thinks other rights are also “useful fictions” before slagging him off about this particular point. It might also help to know what he means by “useful.” I think “useful fiction” is a way one might need to view any number of rights in the absent of a belief in some kind of rights-providing deity. I may, let me get back to you on this, regard most rights as “useful fictions” myself. That word “useful” covers a lot f ground for me, personally, though, including a fierce attachment to the fictions.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 2, 2005 @ 12:35 pm
Rich, could you, for the space of maybe even one post, discuss rather than fence? Even argue rather than fence. Your adversion to “beach houses” is the maneuver of someone who refuses to engage his interlocutors in a spirit of frank enquiry. I’m not talking about “keeping the barrier islands habitable by beach houses.” I’m talking, among other things, about keeping the barrier islands. And the brackish marshes. And the sweetwater marshes behind them.
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Really, all of you, I meant it in the original post. Show some fvcking humility about your views, whatever they are.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 2, 2005 @ 1:06 pm
All right, Jim, rather then fence I’ll just say that I literally don’t understand your comment. You wrote:
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“Third, I think here as elsewhere your advocacy on behalf of managerialism elides the fact that managerial liberalism in itself can’t resolve conflicts in values. The notable ones here are environmental versus economic, among others. Plans to abate sinkage in NO mean saltwater intruding on freshwater elsewhere along the coast, for instance. Billmon’s long post of Wednesday about environmental degradation is well-taken, but it also implies a monumental conflict between keeping the delta habitable by humans and keeping it ecologically viable.”
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I am perfectly willing to agree that you didn’t mean beach houses on barrier islands, if you say that’s not what you meant. But I don’t understand what you did mean. In particular, I don’t see how changing the deposition of silt in the delta to increase the amount of wetlands barrier protection reduces the overall number of barrier islands, saltwater marshes, or sweetwater marshes.
Comment by Leonard —
September 2, 2005 @ 1:26 pm
Jim, you ask way above if the behavior of the people in Apocalyptic New Orleans (ANO) doesn’t “discommode” me, which I had to look up. (Nice vocab word.) Anyway, it really doesn’t. I expect that sort of thing. The reason for government is that some people are animals (and many more in circumstances like ANO), and they must be governed. If you remove the government, they’ll revert to uncivilized behavior. In fact with many of them, they’ll act in uncivil manners even with government present.
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If everyone were angels, then we wouldn’t need much governance outside of self-government, and we’d probably not have the state. But we are fancy apes, not angels.
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What’s astounding in a catastrophe is not the presence of degenerate anarchy, but the presence of civil order. And ANO is just full of that, too. So I’m a glass-half full kinda guy. I certainly don’t expect people to act nicely no matter what circumstances they find themselves in. If things get desperate enough, the selfish genes will out.
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You talk as if I expect my kind of anarchy to break out the moment a disaster strikes. No, not at all. Neither do I expect it when a state is forceably removed (as happened in Iraq, for example, and we talked about that then). I am sure there is a lot of self-help going on in ANO, as well as very small-scale organization. But it will never get beyond that, since everyone there knows that the state will return as soon as possible.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 2, 2005 @ 1:38 pm
About rights being “fictions”, I think that any right is only as strong as the government that enforces it. Anyone is perfectly able to believe in whatever rights they would like to believe in, but without enforcement of those rights, they don’t exist. Some people try to get around this by theorizing about natural rights or God-given rights; I don’t find such arguments convincing. In particular, property rights vary so widely from one society to another and one time to another that I’d have a hard time thinking of them as not societally determined.
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“Useful” is harder to define, because of course you can ask, useful for what? And as (I think, if I understand him rightly) Jim says, managerialism can’t pick a purpose for itself, it’s a tool that’s used towards whatever values you pick out for it. My own belief system places individual freedom as the highest value, with the understanding that if you’re poor, you’re not free. Having a system of property rights appears, to a certain extent, to be a useful tool in pursuit of this goal.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 2, 2005 @ 1:41 pm
Leonard, I think that there’s some indication that the violence in New Orleans is largely due to the history of racism there. People generally don’t become that violent in natural disasters; they usually pull together. But in a society where divisions have already been made quite clear, there isn’t much to pull together around.
Comment by Avram —
September 2, 2005 @ 2:06 pm
Rich, I hadn’t thought of that aspect of the racism angle till now. (Other aspects of it were pretty obvious.) But yeah, New Orleans is the place that preserved words like “octoroon” and other various fine gradations of racial distinction long after most places, isn’t it?
Comment by Eric the .5b —
September 2, 2005 @ 8:45 pm
“New Orleans — the location of which was not chosen by some planner somewhere”
Actually, since New Orleans was founded at its location for military reasons, I think you’d have to call that “planned”.
Comment by Diana —
September 3, 2005 @ 9:19 am
“a spectacular failure of anarchy and government both.”
That’s your perspective but one I don’t share.
Mine: New Orleans is a spectacular *success* of anarchy. It is anarchy taken to its logical conclusion: coalitions of armed males aggressing against other coalitions of armed males while women and children cower in abject terror.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 3, 2005 @ 10:56 am
Rich, you would also call rights to free speech, assembly, the exercise of religion, security from warrantless search and legality of abortion “fictions” too, correct?
I suppose that a libertarian cynic – oh hey, I’ll be that guy – would say that New Orleans represents a spectacular success of government too, since it’s real business is preserving the privilege of its members and they, at all levels, seem to have come through just fine.
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Diana, thanks for cheering me up!
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Avram, my understanding was always that, while New Orleans was decidedly southern in its race relations, it was nevertheless more “liberal” about race than surrounding areas. (Compare, say, to Mississippi.) I’m not remotely arguing that it has been any kind of racial paradise throughout its history, but I think there are many, many areas in the south where the wounds of racism go deeper. An “octoroon” in NoLa would, by the “one drop rule,” simply have been a [N-word] in much of the rest of the South.
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I owe Eric and Rich more about planning and ecology versus environment etc.
Pingback by Catallarchy » Two Thoughts —
September 3, 2005 @ 6:12 pm
[...] rchives/2005/09/03/a-picture-is-worth/>post drives home further the essence of what Jim said: this was a [...]
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 3, 2005 @ 9:07 pm
“Rich, you would also call rights to free speech, assembly, the exercise of religion, security from warrantless search and legality of abortion “fictions†too, correct?”
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Correct. You only have a right to exercise of religion, say, if the government forceably prevents members of the majority religion from burning down your place of worship or otherwise stopping you. Some polities, such as the USSR, were well known for lists of “rights” that were not enforced and were therefore meaningless except for propaganda purposes. This includes the U.S. to some degree; the 4th Amendment, for example, was a dead letter until the mid-20th century, and “voting rights” were clearly not there. And none of these rights are in practise unlimited; there are any number of restraints on even what we think as of basic rights such as free speech or assembly. So when someone says “I have a right” what they mean is “I expect the government to take certain actions.” But the government may not.
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Of course, propaganda sometimes leads to a right becoming an actuality if people take the propaganda seriously. When someone says that rights are real, not fictional, what they appear to me to be saying is that they strongly urge that society be set up according to certain rules. Which is all very well; I agree with most proposed rights.
Trackback by selling waves —
September 5, 2005 @ 1:11 am
Katrina redux
I have no interest in joining the ranks of the Katrinapundits other than to express my disappointment with those who seem to have more interest in playing the political blame game than in doing good, but I do have a few links….
Comment by Russ Nelson —
September 8, 2005 @ 1:54 pm
Jim, governments interfered with voluntary organizations trying to solve the problem. Wal*Mart had three trucks with water and they were turned away. The nanny state had to protect everyone, even those who with full knowledge that they were risking their lives to save others.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 8, 2005 @ 2:09 pm
Russ, yes. A lot of stories like that have emerged in teh week since I wrote this item.