In the Wake of Katrina, Part III
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
An Objectivist Review by Robert Tracinski | The Intellectual Activist
September 2, 2005
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can’t blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster. If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city’s infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists–myself included–did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster. The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency–indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
“Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
“The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire….
“Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders. “‘These troops are…under my orders to restore order in the streets,’ she said. ‘They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.’ ”
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. “The projects,” as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night’s television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of “the projects.” Then the “crawl”–the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels–gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city’s public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city’s jails–so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations–that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit–but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals–and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep–on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters–not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American “individualism.” But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
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. They don’t use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.The welfare state–and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages–is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
September 8th, 2005 at 12:37:23 am
Though this article spells it out more precisely, I can’t say that I didn’t call it more than a week ago…
September 8th, 2005 at 12:53:45 am
It makes sense now! Thanks! I was trying to figure out exactly what happened, and besides a few quirks, this seems to fit pretty well. I wouldn’t blame it on the welfare system itself, but rather the way that the welfare system is run.
Welfare can be a good thing. In today’s world, it has lost the original meaning just as much as the word “gay” has lost its original meaning. It took me to my late teens to actually learn the original meaning of “gay”, though. And I still haven’t learned what “welfare” originally meant.
September 8th, 2005 at 01:40:04 am
Stickman – I agree. The way the welfare system is run leads to many people that are completely dependent on the system for survival. We see the consequences of that in New Orleans in vivid, sickening detail. There are many people who only occasionally use the welfare system, or use it just once, that don’t fall into the government dependence trap. More local control and funding of welfare (as opposed to distant federal administrators) would drastically reduce this kind of damaging waste.
September 8th, 2005 at 06:01:39 am
Bullshit. Not to say that the welfare system isn’t in major need of revampment, but to say that the behavior of some of the more unscrupulous citizens of New Orleans is a result of welfare–direct or indirect–is at best speculative and at worst an unsupported leap across some logic-swallowing abyss. A person takes advantage of a disaster to rape someone and you want to say it’s because of welfare? What a ridiculous suggestion!
The fact is, disasters naturally lead people to extremes. When people are faced with either dying virtuously or living after acts of immorality, you’ll see both things happen. And then there are those who are simply disturbed for one reason or another (there are many reasons this could be, but welfare is certainly not one of them) and need only an opportunity to “get away with it” before they decide to actually carry out their twisted urges.
Why didn’t this happen on 9/11? Because the devastation was limited to a more confined area; because it was just the people in Manhattan who were actually amongst the disaster, rather than the entire city; because the people outside weren’t stranded without basic needs met for days, weeks on end. It was an entirely different kind of disaster and therefore a pretty poor comparison. One might as well ask why people don’t start raping and killing each other in the vicinity of a carbombing in Baghdad. “Gee, it’s because they don’t have our welfare system!” See, that’s what you’re saying! Please slap your forehead now and ask yourself why you thought that for even a moment you were actually making a point there.
The root of the violence in New Orleans is complex; there is no single cause behind it. Blaming the welfare system is just a masked attempt at attacking something for which you hold an unreasonably deep grudge. Yet another example of taking advantage of an opportunity to commit an act of questionable logic. On a much smaller scale, such misdirected outrage demonstrates on its own the actual cause/effect relationship of the New Orleans crises, and I find it almost unbearably ironic.
September 8th, 2005 at 08:10:23 am
Well I would argue, as Ryan, that the welfare state had a lot to do with shaping people’s behavior and expectations in New Orleans—the idea that one is “entitled”. I mean why in heaven’s name would you shoot at engineers trying to repair a bridge? Engineers who are on your “side”? Well because you can. Because your thought process is shaped by this idea that you are entitled to anything you can get, that the system is supposed to cater to your “wants.” And hey, isn’t that hilarious, look at the engineers scatter! Yeah that’s high quality entertainment there. And then reality and civilization sinks in. Police and national guard units show up and next thing you know you are in body bag. Because you didn’t live up to the contract with civilization, you demanded more, because you were raised to believe that if you shouted loud enough, punched hard enough, the system would deliver. But as they say, what goes around, comes around. The providers will kill off parasites as they find them and as they become bothersome enough. The failure of the civilization structure opened a lot of gates that shouldn’t have been opened and a lot of people succumbed to barbarism in the face of chaos. I think a lot of that barbarism had to do with the welfare state and its conditioning of the “wolves”. I mean if we feed them, they shouldn’t attack us right?
September 8th, 2005 at 10:10:16 am
Chris, I’m not sure you read the entire article. A major point is that New Orleans, lacking a plan to evacuate prisoners, released many “into the wild.” These people (“wolves” in the article), combined with people that have been on welfare their whole lives (selected and trained by our government to act like “sheep”) is not a healthy mixture. The article surmises that these are the two primary groups that stayed behind – people that have been selected because they lack the initiative or skills or what-have-you to sustain themselves and have been further conditioned by the government to never help themselves is a major reason why these people didn’t evacuate.
This is saying nothing of the moral decay and continual squalor that I think it is quite obvious that perpetual cases of welfare and government-subsidizes housing coexist with – whether you believe this is a result of welfare, or simply happens to coincide with its recipients I think could be debated, but I tend to think it’s a bit of both of these myself. It is, in my view, fundamentally immoral to live off the unwilling assistance of others – and doing so for long periods of time, I believe, cannot help but lead to moral decay.
But you don’t have to believe that yourself to see that what happened in New Orleans was not the response elsewhere. Nowhere in Mississippi, Alabama, or other parts of Louisiana did we hear anything about widespread looting, rape gangs, or people taking potshots at rescue workers. I would surmise – although with the media’s selective coverage of events, this is speculative – that this lack of coverage is due to a lack of these events happening in these places, where the devastation is as complete (ie, homes completely destroyed) – although it is an inescapable fact that only New Orleans saw significant obstacles to escaping the destruction after it occurred. Nevertheless, its hard not to compare a bunch of people sitting around on I-10 wondering aloud when help would come (New Orleans) to the people in Mississippi returning to their mobile home – or rather, to its foundation – wondering aloud if anything survived and not once pleading for help that they “deserve”. My response to the first is – Texas is that way – start walking. But to both groups, me heart does go out.
September 13th, 2005 at 05:30:12 pm
Here’s my response to this, in no particular order. I’m writing this at 1 AM, so please forgive any incoherence.
1. Local officials absolutely did not let prisoners go free. That is a total lie. The author probably knows this as he only says this is based on “early reports” even though he wrote the e-mail at least 4 days after the hurricane. But I guess it was too good a story to leave out.
2. This is an attempt to divert attention from the real scandal – the incompetence of the federal government to get aid to the affected area even 2 days after the hurricane had passed. (2 days after the tsunami, we were air-dropping supplies in Indonesia, but we can’t do that in N.O.) The cmdr. of the National Guard said today that with much of the Mississippi Nat’l Guard in Iraq, relief efforts in that state were set back by at least 1 day. I read early in the week about an unnamed source at Ft. Bragg who said so many military helicopters were in Iraq, it took a while to get helicopters to the affected area.
3. There are a few code words/phrases here. “Pack of wolves”; “Third world” – contrasting New Orleans to what happens in a “small town” when a traffic light isn’t working. Third world = black; small town = white. This is playing the race card. The small town traffic light example is so incomparable to the devastation of the flood that it’s laughable. The author asks “why the chaos in N.O.?” when compared with his idyllic small town and NYC on 9/11. For starters, how about that communication was completely wiped out. With people cut off from the outside world, without supplies for more than a few days, & with rising flood waters, people will become paranoid and people will become violent. Rudy Giuliani couldn’t have done any better than what the mayor of N.O. was doing after the hurricane hit because there was no way to communicate. Also, 9/11 had a 10-square block area affected; obviously this was far different. I would add that these same reasons can be given to somewhat defend the federal govt’s slow response.
4. The emphasis of some in the media and some conservatives on the looting really misses the point. The looting of non-essentials (anything other than food and a reasonable amount of clothes) is not defensible, but when compared to the creation of conditions that lead to the deaths of likely thousands of individuals (cutting funding for the levees by 80% or not having the federal response ready), which deserves our attention? The real looting was spending $230M in the last transportation bill on a bridge to an uninhabited island in Alaska because the chair of the Appropriations Cmte. is from Alaska. Conservatives historically are very concerned about property rights and liberals about civil ( i.e., human) rights. This dichotomy is seen in the horrified reaction by conservatives to the looting. Regrettable? Yes. Missing the point? Absolutely. If you add the rapes and murders, that is terrible, but again it should be overshadowed by the larger tragedy. I would add that there were rapes and murders in N.O. every day before the flood as well. The real question, which I don’t have an answer to, is how many more rapes and murders were there during the flood. To the extent there was an increase, and for the sake of argument, I will agree there was, it is partly due to the failure of government, local and federal, to provide order, which is the primary reason of having government in the first place.
5. “Why are they attacking people who are trying to help them?” I asked myself this question and was certainly disturbed by this as well. When people believe their very lives are at stake, it is little wonder they will try to commandeer buses, carjack, scream at the police, etc., etc. Where their belief is irrational, the action is criminal; where the belief is rational, even people in small towns would do the same.
6. The author claims that 300,000 people remained in New Orleans. He also claims he got this from Fox News. I don’t even think Fox was that wrong. About 100,000 people remained. 80% of the population was evacuated, which makes it a rather successful evacuation; especially when you consider you can only leave N.O. by bridges to the northeast or by road to the west-northwest. Speaking of evacuations, if local officials even had time in 2 days or the manpower to enforce a mandatory evacuation (which they didn’t), there aren’t enough buses in the state of Louisiana to transport 100,000 people – not to mention the clogging of roads, gas stations, etc. And where exactly could the mayor of N.O. send 100,000 mandatorily evacuated people? Was the author’s hometown ready to accept them?
7. This reminds me of an interview on CNN in the small Louisiana town where a provisional morgue has been set up. A woman there said she’d rather have people coming in dead than alive because of all of the “problems” the living evacuees would have brought. Now that’s compassionate conservatism.
8. The author claims that in a welfare state, local officials are only concerned with getting welfare payments out and political patronage jobs. Well, there is no better example of a political patronage system gone horribly wrong than when all of the top officials at FEMA have no prior disaster experience and the director’s main qualification must have been that he was Bush’s campaign manager’s college roommate, because it certainly wasn’t the years he spent at the Arabian Horse Association. The author is so perplexed by the welfare state, perhaps he forgot the welfare reform of 10 years ago. Of course, he offers no solutions for chronic poverty. He doesn’t even offer specific criticisms of any particular aspects of what he calls the welfare state – just that it has fostered a sense of entitlement and a lack of initiative (I’m giving his poorly worded argument more justice than it deserves).
9. The author says that there were some good people in N.O. but they were trapped by criminals (wrong, see paragraph 1) or “wards of the welfare state” selected over decades for a lack of initiative living off of “stolen wealth” (wealth! hah!). Selected? Wow, this guy is racist. As of this week, they are now wards of something – of a society that would rather ignore them. In time, we will remember to ignore them again, but for now at least, the forgotten of this country are finally getting some attention. It’s too bad they didn’t get some 2 weeks ago. This guy makes being a ward of the welfare state sound absolutely wonderful. It is such a wonderful existence that it is no wonder that people would prefer to live under such terrific conditions. Poor people like being poor – now that is rich, no pun intended.
10. At the end, the author strongly hints that the victims of the flood don’t have “values” like the rest of us do. No, they are “welfare parasites” with a “brutish, uncivilized mentality” – note the code words. I’m happy to talk about values. What are this guy’s values? Every man for himself, apparently (although a lot of poor people with guns is unlikely to be his vision of utopia). I believe that is an uncivilized mentality. Blithely accepting the poverty and deplorable conditions of millions in this country and using them as an excuse for a feeling of moral superiority is a brutish mentality. I wish I had more answers to solve poverty, but I don’t. I’ve got more than this guy, though. If we gave kids in the inner-city the same education we give kids in the suburbs, then future generations would have a much better shot of breaking the cycle of poverty. What if we offered them the same security – both in terms of police presence and health insurance – that more fortunate Americans can take for granted? I guess the author wants to end public housing – throw people out on the street and cut off their benefits. Who will that affect the most? The children and the elderly. What did they do to this guy? What have they done that makes the author feel so superior to them? They were born or they grew old in the ghetto. But I’d still rather have their lot in life than be someone who lives his life in bitter ignorance and writes e-mails that spread his ignorance like a virus.
September 19th, 2005 at 12:25:49 am
Excellent comment, Scott.
I don’t have the motivation to form a complete response just yet, but I think that you are probably right with #1. I never confirmed this story, and although I did see images of a bunch of prisoners on a highway surrounded by water with only sparse security apparent, I have no good reason to believe that they got away in any good numbers. I will agree with you that at best this is uncorroborated and at worst complete intellectual dishonesty.
However, I’m going to have to disagree with you an the racist comments. I believe any racism you see is you projecting your world view onto this guy’s comments. Personally, I didn’t hear “black” when he said “third world” nor did I hear “white” when he said small town. There are plenty of small towns in the third world. There are plenty of whites in the third world. There are plenty of black people living in small towns. I just don’t make this connection, and I don’t think its legitimate.
And for me, the real point is that the federal government should have no involvement in the hurricane Katrina disaster at all. I don’t particularly care that they didn’t pay for dike improvements, because really, its not their job. In my view, the federal government has neither the responsibility nor the constitutional authority to pay for dikes to protect a city. Those who are most directly affected by the risk – namely, the citizens and the city of New Orleans – should take care of their own business. I don’t see why someone in Idaho should have to pay for New Orleans dikes – or for Fall City, Washington flood insurance for that matter. It makes no sense and its unconstitutional.
If people didn’t expect the federal government to protect them from everything, then maybe they would make good choices about where to live, to build cities, and to invest their resources (ie, build dikes themselves). Or maybe they wouldn’t but then thats their problem and not mine.
It’s not heartless, by any means. Heartless is forcing people to pay for other people’s mistakes, as our current system institutionalizes. What it is is just, and mercy comes from those like me and millions of others who have contributed their cash – voluntarily – to aid victims. I do care. I just believe, very strongly, that forcing people to do what you think is right is a recipe for disaster, for my idea of right and your idea of right are not the same.