The cause of disaster relief is the free market?

Michael Parent is an avowed socialist. He is also a writer, and I’ve read several of his books, notably Against Empire, and To Kill a Nation. They are interesting reads that provide a different viewpoint on nation building and what-not. But he omits a lot of facts, and neglects to properly source most of his information. In “To Kill a Nation,” for instance, most of his anecdotes are from second-hand accounts of the “my-brother’s-friend’s-cousin’s…” variety. Although he does point out the glaringly one-sidedness of the conflict which was present to the people of this country. Anyways, I think he’s piping mad about the Katrina Relief, and I’m not sure why.

Parenti tells us in one breath that Bush and the Fed are the cause of the problem- and in the next breath, tells us that it’s all the market’s fault. This is yet another case of ascribing properties to the free-market which do not, under any definition, belong to it.

He ignores the facts, that absent government subsidies, there may well not have ever developed a New Orleans as we knew it. Absent government funds, the Levees may or may not have been built– but you can rest assured that a private firm, in the business of dam-building, would not have diverted a tremendous amount of its operating budget from dam-building to nation-building, thusly reducing the quality of the product it is paid to provide. Absent government subsidies, the risks of living in an area that gets hit with several tropical storms, and has flooded severely twice in the last 50 years, may outweigh the benefits- in which case people don’t migrate there, and we are left with significantly less mess to clean up, and less death and destruction.

Parenti decries the aid that has poured into the city, and I’m not sure who he’s most upset with. It’s pretty unanimous that the “Bushites” and FEMA have turned a hopeless situation into a dire clusterfuck, and the last report I heard said that the Red Cross was still not permitted in the city. Parenti again ignores the facts of reality— that Wal-Mart, FedEx, and other private sector companies, have been supplying the lion’s share of the aid. The “Invisible Hand” doth pimp-slap thee, Mr. Parenti.

The government has been concerned (or not) with the looting, the rioting, the order restoration, because that, Mr. Parenti, is what governments do! They are experts at the use of force and coercion, and they hold a legal monopoly on the initiation of same. The government isn’t charity, no matter how many people “need” it, no matter how deep the waters flow, etc. And no amount of “need” is capable of transforming a monstrous bureaucracy into an efficient problem solver.

Michael, you said it yourself— everyone and their uncles had been predicting this sort of catastrophe for years. Why then, in the face of such predictions, did the very people, the vast bureaucracy of centralized planning and organization, charged with maintaing, and providing for the maintenance of these levees give up on it? Why did big-government fail us?

hint: It has nothing to do with the free-market.