This is points that would pay libertarians to point out, the failure
of government and politicans when it is so clear in everyday peoples
heads. Even the 10/10 issue of Fortune cover is titled Government
broke down, Business Stepped In. Actually the government lead by the
Democrats locally and from state government and from the federal
government lead by the Republicans impeaded the private sector and
even help make the flooding more
possible.
Sure people often look for leaders but libertarians clearly
need to point out that natural leaders voluntary picked and followed
have far far greater value than politicans. Good politicans have value
( the people are their boss) but it should be a secondary importance
to natural leadership and it would be best not to encourage natural
leaders to be politics.--- In [email protected], "Victor
Bozzo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Hello All,
>
> Without question the best piece documenting the absolute pathetic
bumbling that went on at all levels of Government
>
> in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
>
> Thank you Mr. Rockwell for writing such an informative piece.
>
> I can now laugh hysterically when some supposed 'learned'
intellectual either Liberal or Conservative tells me that we
>
> couldn't survive without Government.
>
>
> Home | About | Columnists | Blog | Subscribe | Donate
>
>
> Conservative Central Planning
> by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
> by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
>
>
>
> Watching the Capitol Hill hearings on what went wrong
after Hurricane Katrina provided a glimpse of what it must have been
like in the Politburo in the 1950s. The Soviet bureaucrats would
gather with the party officials and factory and farm managers to
figure out why grain production was down or why shop shelves were
empty or why the bread lines were ever longer and the quality ever
worse.
>
> They gathered under the conviction that they had a
workable system that was being rendered unworkable because of the
incompetence or shirking or wrecking of certain key players in the
chain of command. No one was permitted to say that the command system
itself was the problem. Instead, they had to place blame on someone,
as if all problems could be reduced to issues of obedience. It was
always a scramble. Whoever was finally said to be at fault faced
certain ruin.
>
> To be sure, there was plenty of blame to go around.
With rats in a maze, there is a sense in which they are all
responsible for not having found the exit. If those rats could also
organize into a hierarchy of control and hold trials, it would surely
produce a great show and many victims. But at the end of the day, the
rats would be no closer to getting out of the maze. And so it was in
the US Congress: the hearings produced a great show with no results
that will make a difference for our future.
>
> The Soviet system had to fully unravel before it became
permissible to state what it used to be a crime even to think: you
can't command an economy. You can make every demand, issue a million
orders, exhaust every financial resource in the state's account,
elevate some people and demote others, dress up in a military costume
and make grand pronouncements from a glorified pedestal, cut off
fingers, toes, and heads, but in the end, you can't make the economy
perform in a way that serves the people unless you let market forces
work.
>
> Not just the Soviets had to learn this. Authoritarian
regimes from the beginning of time have attempted to defy the laws of
economics, step on the interests of the merchant class, control and
redirect the wishes of consumers and entrepreneurs, bend and kick
prices and wages this way and that, and inhibit trade in every way.
But they cannot finally overpower the driving desire on the part of
people to control their own fate and not be subject to the slavery
that is collectivism of all colors, whether red or brown.
>
> Someday, the US managers of crises will have to realize
this same point. But for now, they are like Soviet bureaucrats
scrambling to make an unworkable system function, and creating a
scene that is as farcical as it is tragic.
>
> Consider first how the much-glorified Department of
Homeland Security responded to the Katrina crisis. There is a
mysterious missing day between the time the hurricane hit and the
levees broke and flooded New Orleans. During this strange Monday,
August 29 - a day in which there was a window of opportunity to
prevent the meltdown of civilization - why didn't federal officials
respond or even pretend to respond?
>
> The head of the Department of Homeland Security,
Michael Chertoff, said that he read in the Tuesday morning newspaper
that, according to the headline, "New Orleans Dodged the Bullet." So,
to his mind, there was nothing to do. This was his testimony. This is
not exactly an awe-inspiring admission, but it speaks to a truth that
few are willing to admit: government officials live normal lives.
They do not partake of the mind of God. They get their news just like
you and me. And they have far less information than the body of
knowledge generated by the signaling process of the market economy
and the private sector.
>
> We might even say that they are in effect sub-normal in
intelligence, because government officials stand outside of society,
cut off from normal channels of information that the rest of us take
for granted. They are isolated from markets and the regular pressures
of life. They are not owners of what they control, and have no real
stake in the value of their product. They are surrounded by some of
the most peculiar people in the world, namely lifetime bureaucrats,
power-mad politicians, and lobbyists on the make. This is their world
and this is what they know.
>
> Now, they enjoy the illusion of being better informed
than the rest of us, so it would never occur to a high official to
surf Google News to find out what is really going on. Thus was it
apparently beyond the capacity of FEMA to find out that the National
Weather Service had issued a flood warning soon after the hurricane
hit. The National Weather Service in turn was only reporting what
many private local media outlets were saying.
>
> Certainly the municipal government of New Orleans got
the message. It issued a warning to residents, and then all the
officials packed up their stuff and headed to Baton Rouge. I suppose
that this was the plan that the bureaucrats came up with after having
received a $500,000 federal grant in 1997 to design a comprehensive
plan for evacuation. Half a million dollars later, they agreed on
what the plan should be. Two words: let's go!
>
> Now, we can learn from observing this. It is always the
case that the government's first interest in a crisis is the
protection of itself. The public interest is way down the list.
Government employees have no ancient code that requires them to go
down with the ship. The seafaring captain might feel disgrace if he
lost his crew and passengers but returned safely to shore, but the
government bureaucrat would see this as nothing but rational self-
interest at work. From their point of view, public service is not a
suicide pact.
>
> If this is so, are we wise to expect government service
at times of crisis? Well, here is where it gets complicated. They
always promise that they will take care of us. On the day the
Hurricane hit, for example, President Bush made the following
announcement: "For those of you who are concerned about whether or
not we're prepared to help, don't be. We are. We're in place. We've
got equipment in place, supplies in place. And once the - once we're
able to assess the damage, we'll be able to move in and help those
good folks in the affected areas."
>
> Well, given the calamity that followed, this statement
by Mr. Bush might as well have been a Soviet propaganda poster about
the glorious future of socialism.
>
> If the only response by government had been to turn and
run, they could be accused of hypocrisy, but it would have been
better than the alternative of bad government that stayed to ruin the
work that markets and private individuals do.
>
> As the Hurricane approached, for example, Mr. Bush,
along with nearly every office holder in the entire region,
immediately announced that there would be no tolerance of so-called
price gouging. What is and what is not gouging remain undefined by
law, but there are still criminal penalties attached to doing it. If
you raise your prices to the point where you attract a complaint,
there is a pretty good chance that you will be thrashed as a gouger.
>
> And yet, we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of a
price is. It is a signaling device that allows market players,
including both producers and consumers, to adjust their economic
behavior in light of supply and demand. If supply remains the same
and demand rises, the price too will have to rise so the market can
clear properly. Otherwise there will be shortages and surpluses that
will prove to be a benefit to no one. Bill Anderson has called
gouging rules a form of back-door price controls, and he is right.
They create victims, encourage economic dislocations, and foster
black markets.
>
> One might think that a Republican administration would
understand this, but reflect on the fact that Iraq still has very
strict price controls on gasoline, controls that were instituted by
the US after Saddam was overthrown. Don't think for a minute that it
is beyond the capacity of the Bush administration to do what the
Nixon administration did, which was to believe that the laws of
markets can be overridden by regulatory force.
>
> Anti-gouging laws, to the extent they are obeyed, will
create shortages. But in telling the sad tale of Katrina, I would
like to begin not with a case of shortage, but with a strange case of
surplus.
>
> One week after the hurricane, FEMA ordered the Army
Corps of Engineers to buy 211 million pounds of ice from IAP
Worldwide Services of Florida. Trucking companies were notified of a
grand opportunity since the government was paying the bills for
delivery, and the dispatchers sent out the word. There is no space to
explore the workings of IAP Worldwide, but I will observe that the
company, which exists solely to get paid by your tax dollars as a
federal contractor, has a new CEO who most recently held the position
of vice president of national security programs for the notorious
Kellogg Brown and Root. His name is David Swindle.
>
> But back to the story of the ensuing chaos. One trucker
picked up ice in Greenville, Pennsylvania, and was told to drive it
to Carthage, Missouri. But when he arrived in Carthage, he was told
by a FEMA official to go to Montgomery, Alabama. After a day and a
half sitting in Montgomery, he was told to go to Camp Shelby,
Mississippi, after which he was sent to Selma, Alabama, after which
he was sent to Emporia, Virginia, where he stayed for a week burning
fuel, until he was sent to North Carolina, and finally to Fremont,
Nebraska, where he dropped the ice in a government storage unit.
That's 4,000 miles over a period of two weeks.
>
> This was hardly the only case.
>
> The news media chronicled the stories of these
truckers. A truck full of ice was sent from Dubuque, Iowa, to
Meridian, Mississippi, then to Barksdale Base in Louisiana, then to
Columbia, South Carolina, and finally to Cumberland, Maryland, where
he waited for six days before being sent to Bettendorf, Iowa, where
the ice was unloaded. Another truck was sent from Wisconsin to
Missouri to Selma to Memphis, Tennessee, before finally dropping off
the ice in a storage unit.
>
> Do you know how many drivers were enlisted in this
incredible charade? 4,000. No one knows for sure how much ice ever
got through or how much if any good it did.
>
> In one of the first incidents reported of what was to
be two weeks of catastrophe, a group of volunteer fire fighters from
Houston came to New Orleans wanting to help. They were told to wait.
They waited 48 hours and were ordered to go back. A group of doctors
from Maryland tried to get in but FEMA sent them on to the Red Cross,
which said it could do nothing without the approval of federal health
officials.
>
> After the New Orleans mayor made a call for
firefighters to come help, 1,000 volunteers were sent to Atlanta,
where they were put in a conference room at the Sheraton hotel and
subjected to seminars on sexual harassment and other bureaucratic
matters. They were then told that their job would be to distribute
flyers with a message on it: call 1-800-621-FEMA. Many or even most
of these well-trained people left town. Those who stuck it out and
headed for Louisiana were aghast that their first assignment was not
to fight fires, which had been raging for a week, but to escort
President Bush on his TV-laden tour of the area.
>
> You can see all the photos on WhiteHouse.gov.
>
> In fact, FEMA refused offers of help of all sorts,
mainly because of issues of control. FEMA declined help from Amtrak
in evacuating people from New Orleans. The Chicago municipal
government wanted to send volunteers from the fire department, police
department, and hospitals all over town, but FEMA said no. The same
happened to New Mexico, whose governor volunteered equipment and
personnel.
>
> FEMA prevented Wal-Mart from delivering three tank
trucks full of water, and the Coast Guard from delivering diesel
fuel. It even cut the communications lines for Jefferson Parish. The
local sheriff ended up posting armed guards to protect the restored
lines from FEMA - an interesting model that many communities around
the country would do well to imitate in the future.
>
> A chief medical officer for a large ambulance company
says he was unable to find helicopters to pick up dying patients at
the Superdome. He walked outside and discovered that two helicopters,
donated by an oil services company, had been ordered to stay in the
parking lot. Morticians attempted to donate their help. But FEMA said
absolutely not on grounds that they were not officially certified by
FEMA to perform such services, so the bodies of the dead piled higher
and higher and no one was there to help.
>
> As for the National Guard, for days it would not allow
reporters into the Superdome where tens of thousands were trapped.
People were hungry and thirsty, but the National Guard would not
allow the Red Cross to deliver any food.
>
> Here is the astounding statement from the spokesperson
of the Red Cross: "The Homeland Security Department has requested and
continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into
New Orleans. Right now access is controlled by the National Guard and
local authorities.. We cannot get into New Orleans against their
orders."
>
> The Salvation Army attempted to rescue two of its own
officers trapped in a building and on dialysis. They rented three
boats for a rescue. But they were not allowed through, though to be
fair the Salvation Army didn't specifically name the government as at
fault, but it did point out that all private efforts were running
into similar kinds of obstacles, so the message was clear.
>
> Meanwhile, the USS Bataan, a floating hospital for 600
patients, that happened to be at sea and rode out the storm, was
still sitting empty by the third day, not permitted to do its job.
>
> An astounding case of ineptness comes to us from the
case of three Duke University students who drove to New Orleans to
help but were turned away by the National Guard. They had seen the
news and knew that they could help, and wondered why they should be
pushed around by bureaucrats. Being college sophomores, they took a
risk. They forged press credentials, with fake IDs and shirts and the
works. They went back and adopted a haughty tone. The National Guard
waved them through immediately.
>
> Then the students drove to the Convention Center. There
they found thousands of sick, hungry, thirsty, and dying people in
desperate need. They found a man who had welts all over his body. He
was in a tree covered with fire ants as the flood waters rose, and
there he stayed being bitten repeatedly for up to 24 hours.
>
> The boys picked him up along with three others and
drove them to a Baton Rouge hospital. They made another trip there
and back with more people before they began to become frightened of
what the government might do to them. On one return trip, they
observed 150 empty buses driving the other way - and they have a
video to prove it.
>
> One can only express astonishment at how the government
treated the tens of thousands of people that it had herded like
cattle into large public spaces. For reasons that are still unclear,
the government couldn't seem to get its act together on transporting
them out even as the people themselves were forbidden to leave. Once
the central planners decided to move all these people from the
Superdome to the Astrodome, no means of transport arrived, even as
aerial photos showed miles and miles of public buses available.
>
> Indeed, the first bus to reach Houston was not driven
or approved by the government. It was commandeered by 20-year-old
Jabbar Gibson, who drove it from the floods and picked up as many
people as he could and drove all the way to Houston, a 13-hour drive!
He beat the government's system by a day. Meanwhile, the tens of
thousands of people who had been shoved into the Superdome on Sunday,
before the floods came, were still suffering in that massive calamity
by Friday and Saturday.
>
> Perhaps the most astounding case of incompetence has
received the least attention. It relates to a 500-boat flotilla
stretching over 5 miles that left for New Orleans from Acadiana Mall
in Lafayette. It involved 1,000 people who had hoped to rescue
hospital patients and take them to safety. It consisted of private
boaters, fishermen, hunters, and others who had spent their entire
lives navigating Louisiana waterways.
>
> Once this caravan arrived, they were turned away by the
Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which was now being run by
FEMA. All five hundred boats were turned away and ordered out.
>
> Now keep in mind that this was three days after the
hurricane hit. There were hundreds of people inside the Charity
Hospital in New Orleans alone. They had no supplies and only three
had been rescued. At this very time, the head of the FEMA-ized
Wildlife and Fisheries Department announced to the world on
television that it needed no help from anyone and that it had all
matters under control.
>
> Some White House staff members put together a DVD of
the evening news coverage for Mr. Bush to watch on Air Force One,
which was the only way they could get him to understand the depth of
the crisis. The purpose of the action was not so much to help people,
of course, but rather to stop the meltdown of the president's
reputation.
>
> In fact, by the time he actually arrived in Louisiana,
food and medicine deliveries, such as they were, were halted on
orders of the White House, to make room for the presidential caravan.
>
> In one particularly interesting detail, Katrina
triggered the first use of the Department of Homeland Security's
great accomplishment since it was created after 9-11: the National
Response Plan, a 426-page central plan for dealing with a crisis on
the level of the post-Katrina floods. Here is how the government
describes it:
>
> The National Response Plan establishes a
comprehensive all-hazards approach to enhance the ability of the
United States to manage domestic incidents. The plan incorporates
best practices and procedures from incident management disciplines -
homeland security, emergency management, law enforcement,
firefighting, public works, public health, responder and recovery
worker health and safety, emergency medical services, and the private
sector - and integrates them into a unified structure. It forms the
basis of how the federal government coordinates with state, local,
and tribal governments and the private sector during incidents.
>
> What happened to the National Response Plan after the
floods? It remained what it always had been: a colorful PDF download,
a thick book on the management shelves, an item in the Government
Printing Office catalog, bird-cage liner, and many other things. One
thing it was not was a national response plan that did all those
glorious things listed above. As with all such plans from time
immemorial, it was a dead letter.
>
> As for the National Guard, when it arrived it did what
a military does best: harass the residents. Working with the police,
it began to enforce an order for everyone to evacuate. As the New
York Times summarized the order: "no civilians in New Orleans will be
allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind."
>
> The National Guard allowed themselves to be videotaped
going from house to house, and mansion to mansion, knocking down
doors, searching for weapons, handcuffing owners and humiliating
them. They called these people "holdouts," a phrase right out of
Baghdad.
>
> One storm trooper - that's a pretty good name for them -
was asked whether he would shoot residents if they resisted. Yes, he
would, he said. He added, "It's surreal. You never expect to do this
in your own country."
>
> I've provided a look at some of the terrible failures
by the government - not only failing to do what it claimed it would
do, but actively working to prevent others from helping. The cost to
human life and prosperity is incalculable. But, one might say, at
least the government is generous now in preparing to spend perhaps
$250 billion to clean up and reconstruct what was destroyed.
>
> But who will get this money and where will it go?
Cynics could not be more correct: the first company to receive the
money was our old friend Kellogg Brown and Root, a current client of
Mr. Bush's former campaign manager and former head of FEMA. KBR is a
subsidiary of Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Dick
Cheney. Another winner is Bechtel, whose former head is now in charge
of Bush's Overseas Private Investment Corp. The top rebuilding
priority: repairing government military bases in Louisiana and
Mississippi.
>
> If you work for one of these companies, you will do
very well by this aid. As for the victims, they can expect little
from the monstrosity that taxes and controls them relentlessly on the
pretext that it will protect them and care for them when no one else
will.
>
> Fortunately for the people who lived in flooded areas,
they did not face the crisis alone. The private commercial sector,
along with thousands of religious charities, was there to help.
Indeed, John Tierney of the New York Times was one of the few
mainstream journalists to notice that Wal-Mart improved its image
after Katrina. Its stores in the disaster-stricken areas still
carried generators. Wal-Mart trucks rode into areas immediately
following the hurricane and gave away chain saws, boots, sheets, and
clothes for shelters, plus water and ice. It alone had prepared for
emergency with its own emergency operations center.
>
> Chris Westley further noted that Wal-Mart gave $20
million in cash donations, 1,500 truckloads of free merchandise, food
for 100,000 meals, and the promise of a job for every one of its
displaced workers. After comparing FEMA's failures with Wal-Mart's
successes, he concluded that government emergency management ought to
be abolished.
>
> Tierney, however, drew the wrong conclusion. He said
that the Wal-Mart CEO "is the kind of leader we need to oversee the
tens or hundreds of billions that Washington will be spending on the
Gulf Coast. [President] Scott could insist on low everyday prices
while still leaving the area as well prepared for the next disaster
as Wal-Mart was for Katrina."
>
> In fact, if Lee Scott were given a government job, it
would only be a matter of time before he became just another Michael
Brown, the disgraced former FEMA head. This isn't a matter of
character. It is a matter of the maze in which you find yourself,
with market-generated exit signs, or none at all, thanks to the
government.
>
> As Walter Block, Mark Thornton, and many others have
shown, it was not the storm as such that did the damage, but the
failure of the government levees. Combined with the levees-only river
management strategy of the Army Corps of Engineers, the floods were a
disaster waiting to happen. Just imagine if the town were private
like your home or car. Insurance companies would have taken a huge
role in risk assessment, not only charging more for higher risk but
insisting on management strategies that reduce risk and rewarding
those who adopt those strategies with better premiums. This works on
the same principles as your homeowners' insurance, which combines
rules and incentives to reduce the likelihood of losses.
>
> Government insurance, however, makes us less cautious
and more willing to take risks. It prices coverage from losses far
too low and creates an environment where disasters like flooding are
waiting to happen. With programs like subsidized flood insurance,
government is like a bad mother who pays her children to run with
scissors.
>
> Government ownership is even worse because there are no
signaling systems in operation at all. It was also the government
that created a false sense of security for people in New Orleans, who
were led to believe that the levees would hold and pumps would work.
And when the floods finally did come, they were told the government
would be there to manage the crisis.
>
> But the government cannot manage crises, as the
response to Katrina demonstrated. The local government fled. The
state government was dithering. And the federal government actively
worked to prevent good things from happening. The thousands and
millions of acts of private heroism that took place after Katrina
occurred despite government and not because of it.
>
> And yet what lessons does the political culture want us
to take from this? It is the same lessons we are instructed to learn
after NASA spends and spends and still can't seem to make a reliable
space shuttle. We are told that NASA needs more money. The public
schools absorb many times more - thousands times more - in resources
than private schools, and still can't perform. So we are told that
they need more money.
>
> The federal government spends trillions to "protect"
the country and can't fend off a handful of malcontents with an
agenda. And so we are told that the government needs to start several
new wars and erect a massive new bureaucracy and put sections of the
country under martial law at the slightest sign of trouble. And spend
more money.
>
> So too, Congress can allocate a trillion dollars to fix
every levee, fully preventing the last catastrophe, but not the next
one. The real problem is the same in all these cases, not
insufficient resources but public ownership and management.
>
> Public ownership has encouraged people to adopt a
negligent attitude toward even such obvious risks. But private
developers and owners, in contrast, demand to know every possible
scenario as a way to protect their property. But public owners have
no real stake in the outcome and lack the economic capacity to
calibrate resource allocation to risk assessment. In other words, the
government manages without responsibility or competence.
>
> Actually, it was Mr. Bush who said one of the most
sensible things, on September 2, 2005, "If you want to help, if
you're listening to this broadcast, contribute cash to the Salvation
Army and the Red Cross.. They're on the front lines providing help to
the people who need help."
>
> But it was two weeks later when his other instincts
kicked in and he delivered a very different message, one that is
deeply alarming. He said: "It is now clear that a challenge on this
scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the
armed forces - the institution of our government most capable of
massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."
>
> Interesting that his beloved military was not there at
a moment's notice. It now cites its own failures as the great excuse
to expand its powers. So the government will spend the next several
years preparing for another Katrina that will never come, just as it
spent the last several years preparing for another 9-11 that will
never come. The next crisis will be something completely unexpected,
and once again the government will fail. But we will be left with a
government with some very bad habits, among which are declarations of
martial law, mandatory evacuations, gun and price controls, and other
totalitarian ways.
>
> And given that this is a Republican administration with
its own internal culture, and its attachment to military means, we
get what can only be described as the continuation of the fascist
track: the militarization of the country under its own armed forces.
>
> So far as I know, this passing remark by Mr. Bush has
provoked no commentary in the national press. Commentators in the
organized conservative movement have displayed an appalling deference
to the administration's priorities, with National Review consistently
arguing for more spending and militarization, Rush Limbaugh calling
for price gougers to be strung up, and even some free-market friends
calling for billions to rebuild New Orleans as a way of showing
terrorists that we won't let the weather get in the way of progress.
On the last point, I kid you not.
>
> Conservatives have been especially bad on tolerating
egregious uses of the military. We need to reflect on what it means
to have the military take over in the event of crisis. What kind of
ideology promotes such things, and looks the other way when it
happens? I think I know, and it serves as a reminder that not all
threats to freedom come from the left.
>
> A clue comes from the neo-Nazi novel called The Turner
Diaries, sometimes cited as the motivating force for the bombing of
the Oklahoma federal building, which ends in what the author regards
as the utopian political system. After a world war that exterminates
all non-whites, a military regime takes over the United States and
centrally plans the economy under martial law. All food and water are
distributed on military trucks, all production takes place on a
planned basis, and the merchant class is required to obey or be shot.
The government also places flower boxes under every window.
>
> The author describes this race-based national socialism
as if it were a system with an inherent appeal to the reader, and
perhaps there are people economically ignorant enough and full of
enough loathing for humanity and freedom to regard it as attractive.
I do know that in our own times there are people waiting in the wings
who long for power and who are drawn to the ideal of a militarized
society and a centrally managed economy. Some call themselves
conservatives, and they are as much a threat to civilization as those
with the same ideas who call themselves liberals.
>
> But let me end with several notes of optimism. The
first is implied in all that I said above. The government cannot
actually do what it promises, and there is a way in which we can only
be thankful for that. It cannot succeed in managing a central plan.
Its plans will always fail. The government tries to use its failures
as an excuse for more power, but with every failure comes a
substantial degree of public humiliation for the public sector, and
that humiliation can provide a basis for the undoing of government
authority.
>
> Some people say that a loss of government authority
will mean the breakdown of civilization. Actually it will create the
preconditions for the reestablishment of civilization, and in a state
of freedom that can happen very quickly. The aftermath of Katrina
illustrated in a million individual acts of charity and enterprise
that people can manage their affairs, even amidst the chaos.
>
> The calamity following Katrina was an egregious
display, one that gave the federal government a black eye. The
Democrats will continue to use this to harm the Republicans, which is
fine by me, but it is not just Mr. Bush that is suffering, but the
whole apparatus of central planning by decree from above. A
government that cannot manage a crisis should not be trusted to
manage anything at all. Thanks to Katrina and its dreadful aftermath,
I think it's fair to say that the age of not trusting government has
returned with a vengeance.
>
> It took decades for the rot to give away underneath the
Soviet apparatus of central planning. But eventually the
implausibility of the entire project was no longer possible to deny.
It gave way under an intellectual reaction against the whole of
socialism. We are seeing something like that take place today, as
government fails in Iraq and New Orleans and in every place around
the country and the world where it causes problems and creates no
solutions.
>
> The age of confident central planning is behind us.
Right now, the state is just trying to keep its head above water. If
freedom is to have a future, the time will come when it will sink to
an ignoble end, and we will wonder how we ever believed in this myth
called government crisis management.
>
> The advocates of freedom and the partisans of private
enterprise will be there with the intellectual equivalent of
flotillas, barges, buses, helicopters, and the whole apparatus
necessary to rescue liberty from every attempt to kill it. And when
our City on a Hill comes to be, it will be privately built to
withstand any flood.
>
> This speech was delivered at the Mises Institute's
conference on The Economics of Fascism.
>
> October 8, 2005
>
> Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is president
of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of
LewRockwell.com and author of Speaking of Liberty.
>
> Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com
>
> Lew Rockwell Archives
>
>
>
>
>
> Back to LewRockwell.com Home Page
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
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