We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I am sure very few readers have the slightest doubt about the Samizdata Editorial opinion on forced removal of sovereign individuals from their property. It is without a doubt their right to use deadly force to defend their property. If there were a confrontation of homeowners and the State, it would not be the first time there has been a Southern showdown between residents and corrupt officials. Although I doubt it will happen in this case, a good dose of property rights enforcement by free men and women would certainly be a pleasant thing to see on the nightly telly in place of the victim of the day image.
Local government officials are claiming they are worried about disease and the danger of gas explosions in the flood and hurricane effected areas in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Poppycock. The population density there is hardly enough at this time to be cause for worries of any massive outbreak. Both are risks which individuals may choose to accept. It is not the place of the State to second guess the wisdom or foolishness of the individual citizen.
Now, finally, in my round about way I come to General Inge. In his recent press briefing he is ducking and weaving on the issue of committing violence upon peaceful American citizens:
GEN. INGE: I’ve been watching the news this morning and I understand that this is an issue. The situation as I know it now is that civil authorities in Louisiana and New Orleans are discussing this issue. It’s not clear to us what the exact state of the mission is. We would believe — we are told there are some 900 policemen in New Orleans. We would certainly see forcing evacuation as a first priority for them to work. If the authorities in the state of Louisiana chose to use their National Guard in a state status, that would certainly be permissible and their call.
When this turns into a law enforcement issue, which we perceive forced evacuation is, regular troops would not be used.
I sense relief in his words that his troops do not have to take part in this foolishness. I also sense he is politely sidestepping what he really wants to say about the local authorities.
Addendum: One of our commentariat supplied this reference. Read it. The State Is Not Your Friend.
I have read a comment that said that New Orleans had large numbers of school buses, literally hundreds of them, which were not only not used by local government to move people out of New Orleans, they were abandoned to the floodwaters. Is this true?
Now presumably the local authorities in New Orleans were uniquely aware of the economic situation of their poorer subjects and thus aware of their lack of motor transport when they started telling people to evacuate New Orleans.
If that fleet of buses was indeed available right there within the city, can anyone explain why, rather than encourage people to assemble at the Superbowl without any logistic planning in place to actually cope with them or plans move them elsewhere promptly, why were these buses not used to move those displaced people to several sites not so close to New Orleans (i.e. somewhere the transportation and logistic infrastructure were not so badly disrupted) and then use those same buses to provide logistic support for a few days for the relocated people. Presumably Louisiana has contingency fuel stockpiles that are enough for a few hundred buses for, say, 4 to 5 days (i.e. the peak crisis period)?
I realise that logistical planning is not a game for amateurs but seeing as the transportation assets were just sitting there near the people who needed transportation, surely there must have been a way for the city government to have avoided what happened in New Orleans even if the situation in more rural areas may have been more problematic. Am I am missing something?
Update: Take a look at this. Yes, the buses were indeed there and some people did indeed get evacuated… but guess who?
Robert Tracinski has written an interesting article laying out why he thinks what happened in New Orleans was a man-made rather than natural disaster.
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. And they don’t use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
I do not entirely agree with the article’s assumptions but the general thesis is compelling.
I became very familiar with that phrase when participating in online debates about guns. It is an odd thing that many of the same people who make the argument that whatever might save one life must be done when advocating gun bans are so scornful of government efforts to give advice on self-protection in the event of disaster. Their scorn is based on the premise that having a supply of bottled water will avail you nothing in a nuclear explosion or catastrophic flood. All it will do, they say, is give you a false sense of security. That is quite true near Ground Zero, but the bottled water could easily make the difference between life and death for some people at the edge of the catastrophe. Why not put some by?
I do not often defend government efforts on anything, but pamphlets on basic precautions seem to me to be a great deal more useful than so much else they do. Cheap per life saved, too. Perhaps that is the problem. The mockers feel that the pamphlets are a substitute for whatever action (which usually means tax-funded government action) they would like to see taken. Could be, could indeed be, but if it saves just one life…
→ Continue reading: If it saves just one life…
Apparently, according to this great story over at CNN, it was still possible to get a decent drink in the centre of New Orleans over the past few days, in the finest decadent traditions of that city.
That must have really annoyed the self-loathing creeps who opined that Katrina was some sort of Divine Punishment for the city’s libertine, jazz-loving past. Screw ’em and make mine a tequila.
Thanks to the eagle-eyed Reason Hit and Run blog for the pointer.
And another thing to think about when we start pointing fingers is this. The government is never equipped to handle a crisis like this. There’s too much bureaucracy – initiative-stifling bureaucracy which prevents swift, effective action. I would like to hear from government employees on this. The nature of that bureaucracy is such that you have very specific guidelines to follow for even the most minute tasks. You need approval for just about everything, and the person you need approval from usually needs approval to give you the approval.
It’s not as easy as say rounding up 4 of your co-workers and saying, “We’ve got someone at such and such an address, let’s go grab her and get her out of there.” Now add a destroyed or disabled command and control center to that bureaucracy and you’ve got a total and complete mess.
You (as a civilian) don’t need “Approved” stamped on 3 different forms before you can run into your neighbor’s house and pull them out. I hope this makes sense.
Anyway, I’m sure there’s been human error in this catastrophe. How could there not be? But what I’m saying is that I’ve come to expect poor decision making and a total lack of initiative from government. They can’t even balance a budget, at the federal, state, or local levels. I could balance my checkbook and spend within my means when I was a teenager. But I’m not gonna point fingers and get into the blame game. If you want me to blame something besides the storm herself, I blame the nature of government in the first place. It’s too big, it’s too slow, it’s too inefficient, it’s too bloated, and it’s too intiative-stifling to be effective in normal circumstances, much less in a disaster. It’s a systemic issue, more than an issue of individual people in government.
– The Interdictor writing yesterday
This article contains some pretty damning stuff.
Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state’s emergency operations center said Saturday.
The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. “Quite frankly, if they’d been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals,” said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.
[…]
Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.
Yup, let the finger pointing begin. However although I am rarely loath to heap scorn on the state for cocking things up, it does need to be kept in mind that this is the worst natural disaster in US history and any blame laying needs to keep a sense of proportion (ha, as if) as expecting the state to magically solve even the most unexpected problems with seamless efficiency is at best (and I do mean at best) rather like relying on a well meaning but hopelessly alcoholic uncle to be there for you when things go badly wrong. Well, he might come up trumps but it is probably not a good idea to expect him to be there when you need him.
I also expect membership in the NRA and other similar groups to surge as people re-learn the lessons of the Los Angeles riots: the state might help you pick up the pieces after the fact and a policeman might come around to draw a nice chalk line around the bodies of your murdered loved ones, but when the veneer of civilisation cracks, you had better have a gun and be psychologically prepared to use it because the reality is that when the predators turn up, you are on your own.
Hat tip to Tom Pechinski
Update: LGF has some more as the blamefest starts to gather steam.
Sci-fi addicts will understand why the Star Trek reference in the title is appropriate.
A comment by the minimally named ‘IC’ on a previous article here neatly sums up an aspect of the situation in the United States:
How many of those who died in the Katrina catastrophe chose not to evacuate? When you died and became one of the satistics, your loved ones would cry and wail in front of CNN, someone started to sue, some politicians’ cushy jobs died with you for not doing their jobs of rescuing you from yourself. Hence we have all these idiotic CYA [cover-your-arse] laws.
On the other hand, if you were forced to evacuate, and Katrina hit Houston instead, and your New Orleans home was looted while you were gone, you start fuming in front of CNN, some politicians got blamed for forcing you to leave…
So either way, it was all bound to be Bush’s fault 
Compared to the overall scale of the disaster, this tale about part of the costs of Hurricane Katrina may not seem that big a deal. But as a music-lover and fan of blues and jazz myself, one cannot fail to be moved by this story.
I recently read Philip K Howard’s The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America. It is an infuriating look at how politicians have legislated responsibility and judgement out of consideration when coming up with ever more exact, non-sensical laws. Even Mother Teresa could not get a break from our bureaucratic nightmare:
In the winter of 1988, Mother Teresa’s nuns of the Missionaries of Charity walked through the snow in New York’s South Bronx in their saris and sandals looking for abandoned buildings to convert into homeless shelters. They found two, which New York offered them at $1 each. The nuns set aside $670,000 for the reconstruction, then, for a year-and-a-half, they went from hearing room to hearing room seeking approval for the project.
Providence, however, was no match for law. New York’s building code requires a lift in all new or renovated multiple-storey buildings of his type. Installing a lift would add upwards of $130,000 to the cost. Mother Teresa didn’t want to devote that much money to something that wouldn’t really help the poor. But the nuns were told the law couldn’t be waived even if a lift made no sense.
The plan for the shelter was abandoned. In a polite letter to the city, the nuns noted that the episode “served to educate us about the law and its many complexities.”
What the law required offends common sense. After all, there are probably over 100,000 walk-up blocks of flats in New York. But the law, aspiring to the perfect abode, dictates a model home or no home.
The book is full of examples like this one, each one showing exactly how critical thinking and common sense have been regulated out of laws in favour of precision. And, as Howard puts it, the more precise the rule, the less sensible the law.
America’s modern legal system has achieved the worst of all worlds: a system of regulation that goes too far —while it also does too little. A number of years ago, two workers were asphyxiated in a Kansas meat-packing plant while checking on a giant vat of animal blood. OSHA did virtually nothing. Stretched thin giving out citations for improper railing height, OSHA re-inspected a plant that had admittedly “deplorable” conditions only once in eight years.
Then three more workers died —at the same plant. The government response? A nationwide rule requiring atmospheric testing devices in confined work spaces, though many of them have had no previous problems. Most such legal dictates are stacked on top of the prior year’s laws and rules, the result is a mammoth legal edifice: federal statutes and rules now total about 100 million words. The US Federal Register, a daily report of new and proposed regulations, increased from l5,000 pages in the final year of John Kennedy’s presidency in 1963 to over 68,000 pages in the second year of Bill Clinton’s.
The second chapter of Howard’s book is entitled The Buck Never Stops. This phrase is what came to mind as soon as I heard all of the responsibility-dodging going on in Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction. And it would make the perfect title for this interview with the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, in which he expresses his frustration at the lack of action taken by authorities at all levels, and their failure to give him any power to act now. Some bites from Nagin’s outburst:
Now, I will tell you this — and I give the president some credit on this — he sent one John Wayne dude down here that can get some stuff done, and his name is [Lt.] Gen. [Russel] Honore. And he came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussing and people started moving. And he’s getting some stuff done. They ought to give that guy — if they don’t want to give it to me, give him full authority to get the job done, and we can save some people.
…[D]id the tsunami victims request? Did it go through a formal process to request?
…But we authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq lickety-quick. After 9/11, we gave the president unprecedented powers lickety-quick to take care of New York and other places.
Now, you mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through, a place that is so unique when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody’s eyes light up — you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can’t figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man.
The emphasis on process is mine. By using this word, Nagin has pinpointed the problem with American law. Sure, we need due process in our justice system, and in other areas where we do not wish the government to use (blatant) coercion against its citizens. But there are other instances – fixing a leak in a levee on an urgent basis, for instance – in which procedure more often than not gets in the way of a sensible result. In Howard’s words:
[M]odern process barely distinguishes among the vast range of government acts, and has thrown its cloak over every decision. Ordinary decisions are subject to rigid formalities taken as seriously as the due process protection in a criminal trial. The actual goals of government are treated like a distant vision, displaced by an almost religious preoccupation with procedural conformity.
…Individual initiative in government has shriveled up and lies dormant. Process has, indeed, rendered initiative unlawful…Irregularities are dangerous, someone might argue; these procedures serve important practical purposes, like preventing fraud and getting the best price, and it would be unwise to permit exceptions. But serving practicality, as anyone within ten miles of a government contract knows, is the last thing these procedures do. Their inefficiency…is legendary. Fraud, notwithstanding all the procedural layers, happens all the time.
…Orthodoxy, not practicality, is the foundation of process. Its demons are corruption and favoritism, but the creed of this orthodoxy is a perfect uniformity. Only if all things are done the same way can government be fair. Sameness, everywhere for everybody, is the operating instruction of modern government…But concepts like equality and consistency are absolute; they have no logical stopping point; there is no place where they say, “Oh, I certainly didn’t mean that a broken lawnmower should be treated as a federal case,” or, “The Chicago commissioner shouldn’t worry about bidding procedures with the river only a few feet above the leak.”
Where do you draw the line? No one wants to take that risk, so the line is never drawn. Shuffling to the rhythms of process, answering any potential complaint with one more procedure, becomes what government does.
I may be preaching to the choir here, but surely most of us have a strong sense of the government’s ineffectiveness, do we not? Which is why I find it so strange and irritating that so many people in Louisiana believed that the state would save them. It would be a nice thing to believe, a comforting thing to believe, but when push comes to shove, do you really believe that this group of responsibility-dodging, procedure-obsessed egotists would save you? Would you entrust them with your life, the lives of your family, your home? Only cognitive dissonance would allow for such a positive conclusion.
At some point, the wishful thinking of those in danger should have disappeared in favour of reason. For many, it did. For too many others, it did not. If anything positive is to come out of this tragedy, I hope it is a wide awakening across America and other countries that the state is not your friend.
Cross-posted to JackieDanicki.com
Not a direct quote, but it pretty much sums up the comments from a Louisiana politician in this interview with Anderson Cooper (wmv file). Cooper, quite rightly, calls her on her bull – but not nearly as harshly as he should have. (Again, trying to perpetuate the objectivity myth is doing our media no favours here.)
By many accounts, thousands of people are dead. The survivors are, in their thousands, newly homeless. By many accounts, some survivors are being raped and beaten, and many of them are starving and dying of thirst, their corpses being eaten by rats in the streets of America. Yet all this politician can tell us is how wonderful her fellow politicians are. If you do not think statism is a sickness of the mind, watch this video.
Link via Bitchypoo
Tyler Cowen over at his Marginal Revolution blog lists out a load of articles about the case for privatising stuff like flood defence, and critiques of U.S. Federal efforts in that direction. He personally believes that flood defence, spectacularly breached in New Orleans, is a proper function of the state. But being the fine scholar and liberal writer he is, gives a comprehensive roll of reasons for thinking these things could be done better out of the State’s hands.
Flood defence can be presented as one of those classic “public goods” that cannot arise via the Invisible Hand of the market. Is that really the case, though? It seems to me that if the full, insurance-related costs of living in a flood zone were presented to the people either living or looking to live there, it might either encourage a lot of flood-related civil engineering defence, or for that matter discourage locating in such areas in the first place.
Anyway, hindsight is very easy, especially if you are thousands of miles away. In the meantime, I urge folk to look at the many examples of voluntary compassion flagged up by Glenn Reynolds.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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