What Can 70 Years of Welfare Produce?by
Vin Suprynowicz
Juicier details will doubtless emerge – I'm betting we'll see faked-up emergency response plans; levee repair money diverted to build fancy marinas, riverboats, and casinos; the "best and the bravest" abandoning their posts and the buses that could have carried many to safety. But
it would be hard to do a better basic exposé on how disastrous it
proved for the residents of New Orleans to place all their faith
in "government" than has already been accomplished by
our friend Lew Rockwell. "The levees that failed and caused New Orleans to be flooded, bringing a humanitarian crisis not seen in our country in modern times, were owned and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. ... Who knew that a direct hit by a hurricane would cause them to break? Many people, it turns out. Ivor van Heerden of Louisiana State University, reports Newsday, 'has developed flooding models for New Orleans, was among those issuing dire predictions as Katrina approached, warnings that turned out to be grimly accurate.' "Only the public sector can preside over a situation this precarious and display utter and complete inertia," Mr. Rockwell continued. "What do these people have to lose? They are not real owners. There are no profits or losses at stake. They do not have to answer to risk-obsessed insurance companies who insist on premiums matching even the most remote contingencies. So long as it seems to work, they are glad to go about their business in the soporific style famous to all public sectors everywhere. ... " Which brings me to the most disturbing thing I saw on television during the non-stop coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. For the most part, it appeared middle-class and working-class citizens of New Orleans – the kind of people who have jobs and possess private automobiles – had mostly left by the time the storm hit in all its fury. What cameramen found at and near the Superdome the next day, as the floodwaters rose, were members of a mostly black underclass with no resources of their own, a people who over a period of generations have come to expect someone else – through the cash redistribution agency known as "government" – to provide them with or heavily subsidize their housing, their transportation, their health care, even their children's schooling. (How'd that "public transportation system" work, guys?) According to The New York Times, about a third of the New Orleans police force simply walked off the job. Videos show uniformed officers joining in the systematic looting, which was so shameless that looters on occasion waited calmly in line with their shopping carts to take their turn. Do we need to ask what 70 years of the welfare state have taught these folks to believe about "property rights"? And those who were not busy looting were not merely pleading for help. They were angry. They were shouting into the cameras, addressing someone out there – the government? Us? – who they believed owed them an obligation to "get on down here" and bring them some stuff. Food, water, whatever they needed. Bring it to us – the message seemed clear – or we're just going to take it. Americans were once a people proud of their relative self-sufficiency. Yes, we lend our neighbors a helping hand. But my family and the families of most Americans were essentially penniless 70 years ago. Since the Great Depression, we have worked and saved until we have some assets. We set aside for the future. OK, our "security" can turn out to be partly illusory, in the face of nature's power – the trust and support of our neighbors and families may be worth more than we realize. But the value of planning and setting aside is not entirely an illusion. We have cars and bank accounts, accessible even if we're forced to leave home. We have set aside emergency food and water and flashlights and batteries and firearms to defend ourselves and our property. If I lived in a city built below sea level, what would it cost me to buy and store a rubber raft or a beat-up old canoe – perhaps on the roof? Hurricanes are not unforeseen disasters. They come every year. Self-sufficiency has survival value. Applied over a period of generations, the welfare state can breed self-sufficiency out of a people. Look at the fate of the mendicant classes in New Orleans – the ones who trusted government to "provide." Look at what happened to the property of the merchants who trusted their taxes were buying them "police protection." And beware.
Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2005 Vin Suprynowicz |
