I figured this needed to go in here, but I could not agree more with the premise. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/metropolitan/3338550 Sept. 3, 2005, 8:19PM Is Katrina whispering in our ears? By RICK CASEY Some preachers tell us Katrina is God's way of telling us to repent. New Orleans is, to them, Sodom. Biloxi, I suppose, is collateral damage. I think God's message is much less sexy. God is lecturing us on economics. Katrina is God's way of telling us that for all the power of the free enterprise system, it doesn't take care of everything. In other words, thou shall not worship free markets. Actually, a friend from New Orleans pointed out that the most free market in America over the past few days has been on the rubble-filled streets of his hometown. It's a market totally without regulation. You have armed thugs taking advantage of a crisis with all the moral depravity of Enron traders holding up California. So let's begin by saying we need government to protect us from thugs, whether they be armed with guns or power switches. But Katrina speaks of more than the terrors of anarchy. It speaks of the decaying concept of community. Let them rent limos One of the messages I've been receiving is that those people in New Orleans have only themselves to blame. They should have left when the evacuation was ordered. For some that is probably true. New Orleans is a laid-back city. But for many, being told to evacuate was like being told to flap their wings and fly. Nearly one in four residents is below the poverty line. Many don't have cars. Yet the evacuation plan was based on private autos. There was no mechanism to evacuate those without cars, much less those in nursing homes and hospitals. Have they no cars? Let them rent limos. It is no accident that the poor weren't included in evacuation plans, if anything that can seriously be called a plan exists. There is a growing prejudice against the poor, one that results in not-so-benign neglect. It encompasses a belief that if you are poor in the Land of Opportunity, it's your own fault. God wants you to be rich This wasn't true, for obvious reasons, during the Great Depression or World War II. Yet this belief has become part of our national religion, from Washington to the pulpit. Listen to a televised preacher this Sunday or go to a megachurch. The best of the megachurches are great centers of private charity. They are raising vast sums and sending out great armies of volunteers to help with this disaster. But in many of them you will regularly hear that God wants you to be rich. If you just give yourself up to Jesus, he will reward you not just with spiritual wealth but with monetary wealth as well. That sounds like a harmless message, but it holds a dark implication. If you are poor, it is because you are not in God's favor. You lack faith. It's not that these people don't deserve our charity when their need is dire. God wants us to save the sinners. It's that when we think of our community, they're not in it. Churchgoers aren't the only ones responding to this crisis with great generosity. But community means more than charity. At its most basic, it means pooling our resources to protect the common good. It means maintaining the levees that keep out the floods. The widely reported cuts in funding for upgrading the levees of New Orleans are a metaphor for America today. We have adopted a mantra of smaller government, but there are some things too big and too important for private charity and the private sector to handle. These include educating our children, protecting our people from tempests as well as terrorists, and policing our neighborhoods from armed thugs and our markets from corporate thugs. It also includes bringing the poor, most of whom work and many of whom go to church, into the community. To do this requires a change of consciousness. But it also requires governmental action. There's always been a tension between America's sense of community and its creed of individualism. It's possible that the winds of Katrina are so powerful that they are blowing back into the same boat.
Yeah, Or...... It is a natural disaster that has been happening on this earth for the last 4.6 billion years, and this is what happens when you build a city BELOW sea level. DD
You can have a city below sea level, but when you plan for a hurricane that could swamp the entire city, you must plan to get ALL of the people out when an evacuation is ordered. As the article stated, most of the plan was based on private automobiles and when you live below the poverty line, as a quarter of those in the underwater areas did, a car is a luxury that you cannot afford. This article is spot on.
I do agree with that....for sure. However, our country has never been one that is great at planning for things, we are at our best reacting. DD
Which I think is somewhat the point of the article. Free markets by nature are reactive and their strength is in the efficiency of distributing resources throught the individual actions of the participants. While participants may plan for disaster that very planning though ends up distorting the market. For instance as a seller of a manufactured good you want to be able to move that good as fast as possible with having stock since anytime you have to store it without selling you're losing potential revenue. What happens though if there's a disruption in your supply or distribution line you end up either being unable to sell any more since you have no stock, or manufacture if you haven't been stocking raw material. Unless you know for sure there's a disaster coming it makes no economic sense to stock up since that's just wasting resources that could be used more profitably. This makes great sense in the free market but is terrible for disaster preparedness. Since the free market counts on the actions of individuals acting to maximize their own immediate good its difficult to count on all of those individual decisions acting through the invsible hand to affectively plan for disaster. Especially for poorer individuals and small businesses its just too costly to set aside resources that you need now for a future disaster. So in away the free market is always going to be reactive and isn't the mechanism to look for to drive future planning for disasters.
I think it was overall a good article, explaining how prayer and private charity are not enough . I don't think you can count on the megachurches to come to this conclusion as the more the government is taken out of health education and welfare, the more their power grows and the more they can support the party in power.
"We have adopted a mantra of smaller government, but there are some things too big and too important for private charity and the private sector to handle. These include educating our children, protecting our people from tempests as well as terrorists, and policing our neighborhoods from armed thugs and our markets from corporate thugs. It also includes bringing the poor, most of whom work and many of whom go to church, into the community. To do this requires a change of consciousness. But it also requires governmental action. There's always been a tension between America's sense of community and its creed of individualism. It's possible that the winds of Katrina are so powerful that they are blowing back into the same boat." How long before Bush proposes the Hurricane Katrina tax cut? Anyone want to give odds? Keep D&D Civil!!
there will be major incentives for N O rebuilding Honestly. . this will be the greatest Gentrification in the history of this Nation the NEW N O will not look that much like the old one. . . IMO Rocket RIver
Command economies can probbaly act more quickly in these situations, but they don't create much wealth to respond with.
