Libertarian Drive-By Hurricane Blogging
Mrs. O and I watched Episode 3 of Wome! via HBO On Demand tonight, per a tip by Mr. Obscura in comments to the Episode 2-blogging. Consequently there’s less time for the bigthink hurricane-and-government blogging I imagined I’d do tonight than I thought. So a set of links to serve as text for the reading. One of them is, in a bitter way, tongue-in-cheek. I don’t necessarily endorse any of them without reservation, but I think they’re all important.
Tyler Cowen considers five arguments for true privatization of levee management, declines to endorse any of them.
Radley Balko on the anti-government Bushies:
In Iraq, this administration believes it can build a liberal soceity from scratch. It believes government can save marriages, convert convicts to Christianity, eradicate the drug supply, save public schools through nationalized testing, stop unwed sex by teaching abstinence, and solve the problem of high drug prices by forcing the rest of the country to pay for the medication of elderly people. That’s an off-the-top-of-my-head list.
There’s a lot more, including the stakes involved here.
Kieran Healy is Becoming a Libertarian. Not really, but it’s a sweet thought. Makes me of the Frederick Turner poem, “Dumbarton Oaks,” which begins, “If we had kept the eyes of Henry James . . . ” (Turner means the United States, and figuratively, I should reassure you.) Anyway, the early commenters’ excuses about “scaling up” fail to impress, the federal government itself being rather larger than Hyatt Hotels.
Matt Welch makes an early stab at something that merits considerable investigation in the days ahead: how much of the reported disaster-area thuggery was real, and how much simply rumor. Early reports suggest “less than you’d think but more than you’d like” for the first and “more than you’d think but less than you’d hope” for the second. The rumors, as Welch notes, probably caused more deaths than would have happened otherwise. The bitter irony: I suspect local officials and on-site media may have played up the rumors to maximize the national sense of urgency – not out of conscious dishonesty; rather, they had an incentive to both believe and publicize the worst. (What they could see with their own eyes was bad enough, needless to say.) The short-term cost of any exaggeration of the violence of the city was delayed rescue operations. The longer-term cost is already and will continue to be a stigma attaching to NoLa’s displaced persons, especially its black, male ones.
Gene Healy resists the Super-Prez meme. The problems are, first, the President’s team brought this on themselves by selling the guy as the national father-protector for four years; second, when you foster the creation of an entire new bureaucracy you really are culpable when its inaugural outing is not just incompetent but contemptible. Third, the way to kill the Super-Prez meme is not to let Bush off the hook but to remind everyone of Bush’s role in nurturing the Super-Prez meme in the first place.
Brooke Oberwetter suggests two food banks in Texas as good destinations for your charitable dollars. She joins the chorus of those who argue, “But what should be infuriating people isn’t that a big bloated federal bureaucracy headed by a freaking political appointee failed: that should be neither infuriating nor surprising at this point. What should be infuriating to libertarian types is that every OTHER level of government so utterly failed.” I want to do both, dammit!
Christ, but these quickie linkblogging items always take longer than I expect. Night-night.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 6, 2005 @ 11:13 pm
Radley Balko’s article is tripe from top to bottom, and since he doesn’t have comments on his blog, I’ll comment on it here.
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First, he makes a big deal out of the fact that the right makes noise about reducing the size of government while actually expanding it. Yes, so what? This has been the historical result of every anti-government U.S. administration in power, since at least the Reagan administration. When will Balko stop being surprised that anti-governmentalism is another name for looting the treasury, and that you can’t loot unless you spend?
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Secondly, he claims that in terms of corruption the Bush administration is “as guilty as every previous administration”. That is flatly false, libertarian dogma with no basis in reality. Not every government is equally corrupt; it is merely easy cynicism to say so. Corruption is measurable and comparable from one administration to another, it is not some kind of Platonic essence.
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Then he goes into how the Federal government took over the levees in the 1920s and the Corps in the 1960s, and how they weren’t completed 40 years later. Completely historically ignorant. Neither the understanding of what needed to be done, nor the amount of work that needed to be done remained constant over those 40 years; science and engineering have advanced even as New Orleans has been sinking and hurricanes getting more severe.
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Then he says that government officials at the state and local level are “leftist Democrats”. Like Nagin, the ex-Republican who registered Democrat just before the election? Who does Balko think he’s fooling? No major Louisiana Democrat is “leftist”. Balko is simply red-baiting.
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He ends by referring to 9/11 and writing “Massive government failure inexplicably led to a massive expansion of the government.” Inexplicably. Like the Depression inexplicably led to the New Deal? What does Balko think leads to expansion of government? Success? Massive failure has almost always led to expansion of government in modern societies, assuming that the society remains.
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Of course most of the death toll of this tragedy was caused by people who don’t believe in government. And Balko contributed to it. He still is.
Comment by Barry —
September 7, 2005 @ 8:59 am
Thanks, Rich – some of the points that I was going to make, and some more. I think that there should be a meme (shudder) that when some libertarian talks about all governments being corrupt, to excuse one government, people should call BS. That’s like excusing an ice age by saying that all winters are cold.
In terms of private groups doing the levees, sure. Around their assets only, of course, because levees are expensive, and it’s far, far easier to keep a small area unflooded than a large area. If you surround your 100 acres with a high levee, you have a decen chance of survival. If you try to surround thousands of acres, your chances of being flooded are greater.
My guess would be that a libertarian set-up would be much smaller and poorer. The Mississippi would be less navigable (no snag removal, dredging, flooding, shifting of the channel), the land around the river would be subject to fequent flooding, as would all cities.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 7, 2005 @ 9:46 am
That’s right, Barry, it is BS. If an non-pundit anarchist does it, it’s still false, but it’s pardonable; an anarchist is presumably willing to toss out all benefits of government and take their risks along with everyone else. But for a minarchist to do it? Or for a Cato analyst, whether minarchist or not? It is ridiculous for someone who supposedly advises government to say that they hate all government and that it’s all equally bad, simply because it exists. It’s even worse when these people actually go *into* government. I can just imagine the equivalent in industry: “Hi, I’m your new CEO. I think that this company shouldn’t exist, and rather than trying to make it more efficient, I’m going to try to make it smaller. That’s because capitalism is intrinsically exploitative; socialism forever!” Yeah, right.
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Minarchists are going to have start taking at least one principle seriously; if they think that something is a core government function, then they can’t fall back on stereotyped anti-government rhetoric when it is screwed up. When a general screws up a battle, it’s not because government can never fight wars, it’s because the general was incompetent. When police miss an obvious chance to catch a criminal, etc.
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Of course minarchists can decide that disaster relief is not one of the things they’d have government do. In that case, they are the same heartless b*stards as the right. Instead of “let them eat cake”, it’s “let them buy private insurance”, or “let them move to a safer, more expensive area”.
Comment by Kyle S. —
September 7, 2005 @ 12:06 pm
Rich, thanks for your comments. I was thinking basically the same thing. The whole “they’re all just as bad” thing is rather mindless and an abdication of thought. The description of Southern Democrats as ‘leftist’ was another creative description. I’m going to start referring to Chuck Hagel as a pacifist and Jonah Goldberg as the heir apparent to Russell Kirk.
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
September 7, 2005 @ 12:07 pm
Point of clarification: The “Rome” tip was provided by talboito, not I.
Comment by Diana —
September 7, 2005 @ 3:49 pm
I know this is gonna sound, well, nuts, but when I was living in Washington (summer, 1988), FEMA’s rep was that of a mysterious agency that was staffed by CIA people. It’s my impression that the agency went thru a period of professionalization during the Clinton era, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it went back to its former status as a dumping ground for spooks. That wouldn’t be a bit surprising. Overseas humanitarian refugee agencies have had a problem with this (being penetrated by CIA, for obvious reasons) but domestically it’s not be much remarked upon.
I wish that someone (Greg Palast, where are you?) would look into this.
Comment by Jon H —
September 7, 2005 @ 5:44 pm
Question for libertarians: How come socialist Britain has those cool floodgates on the Thames, and free-market America has to rely on giant sandbags after the fact?
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(As an aside, I hate it when people say the breaches have been ‘fixed’. They aren’t fixed, they’re just patched. Those sandbags would likely be worthless in another storm.)
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Regarding the reputed violence, it’s important to note that, in cases that did happen, we probably don’t know the whole story. Some of that may well have been justified. Maybe an old man was bludgeoned to death, but old men can be tough, nasty sons of bitches, entirely capable of assault or rape. Perhaps more so if strokes or dementia have led to a loss of inhibitions, or if they’ve been off their meds.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 8, 2005 @ 7:39 am
Gary, your last comment was condemned by our link spam committee, I’m afraid. Focused, on-point references to a blog item or two in the context of the topic under discussion are acceptable. Catalogs are not.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 8, 2005 @ 7:41 am
Note: I recognize there was some substance mixed into several of the comments above, and I’ve made some implicit replies in the “Precepts and Conclusions” item of last night.