Objectivists on Katrina, or: A pack of wolves unleashed on a pack of sheep
This column, An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State by capital-O Objectivist Robert Tracinski makes some insightful points, if you can get past the giggle-inducing Objectivist stock-phrases like "sense of life". E.g.:
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
... 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. ... 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 incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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.
... 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.
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.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
Comments (10)
Junius
Gee, I guess objectivists have foregone using species-specific notation for large groups (e.g. Flock of sheep)
Published: September 7, 2005 2:14 PM
Brian Moore
Tracinski went with pack of wolves and mass of sheep. 1 outta 2 ain't bad. :)
Published: September 7, 2005 3:24 PM
R.P. McCosker
"[T]he 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects"?
I think it was in 1965 when Martin Anderson's THE FEDERAL BULLDOZER was published -- when "public" (low-income socialist) housing and other welfarism were already ancient news.
Typical of so many who assume that Big Government first got its start during the Johnson presidency. One hears this kind of ignorance all the time -- even, as in this case, from a "columnist," whose very purpose, one might suppose, is to provide well-informed commentary.
Published: September 7, 2005 3:33 PM
Stefan Karlsson
Welfare parasites? Wolves? Ouch, Tracinski is being soo insensitive....
When I used the former term in a debate with Paul Krugman-fans (In the context of describing how welfare systems create a class of welfare parasites), they got very upset with me ("how can you use the word parasite to describe fellow human beings")and so I decided I needed sensitivity training (kidding).
Celine Dion, though, is very sensitive and compassionate, and feels that looters should be allowed to "touch" jeans and TV:s because they allegedly are so poor that they have never touched jeans or TV:s before in their lives.
Published: September 7, 2005 3:41 PM
arielb
what about looting celine dion cd's? well ummm hmmm
Published: September 7, 2005 4:55 PM
melt_core
http://pupismyname.shackspace.com/CelineDionOnLarryKing.wmv
highlights:
- Take a Kayak! Go into those walls !
- I see those mothers over there they are like Cheeze Wizz!
- And, when I open the television..
Published: September 7, 2005 6:07 PM
Lowell R.
Nice to see an Objectivist described as something other than a "crank" on this blog...
On a related note, I just got from the library Gary Hull's (another "capital-O Objectivist") new anthology, The Abolition of Antitrust (Transaction Publishers). It's quite good (though honestly, the same Rand quotes don't have to be repeated on every other page), except for Richard Salsman's rather ignorant remarks on Austrian economics (45-46). "Mises had his own version of perfect competition; his imaginary friend was the 'perfectly-rotating economy'," he asserts -- never mind that Mises explicitly said that this model bears no relation to real economic phenomena (though to be fair, Mises' language is a bit foggy; calling the ERE "an indispensable mental tool" and taking mathematical economists to task for "dealing with [it] as if it were really something existing" [Planning for Freedom 148] on the same page of the same book doesn't help matters).
Published: September 7, 2005 10:19 PM
Paul D
That's an excellent explanation of the behaviour seen by many of the city's poorer residents, Mr. Kinsella.
"...the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose."
That, at least, is positive. No doubt many prisoners were simply political prisoners, jailed for disobeying some government regulation or ingesting a substance the state disapproved of. Unfortunately, any real criminals released would not have paid their debt to their victims, but that never would have happened anyway.
Published: September 8, 2005 10:31 AM
Charles Hueter
I have a close friend who works as a prison guard and his stories never fail to entertain (and horrify). While it is absolutely the case that a great deal of what pass for "crimes" these days are actually not, I think it is also important to point out that a nontrivial number of these inmates pick up some really, really bad habits while in jail. Unleashing a population submersed in a culture of violent gang collectivism and total disrespect for human rights is never going to be a pretty thing.
Published: September 8, 2005 12:00 PM
Tim Underwood
Hello Auburn,
It has been many years since I read 'Human Action'. It was one of those books that stays with a person throughout his or her life. What I liked about reading the book was the author's commitment to reasonableness. (That may not be a word.) Probably reasonableness starts with family planning. From there on it just flows smoothly. People who ignore the planning aspect of their life probably live precariously close to the criminal side of human action.
It is pleasant, and refreshing, to visit a site dedicated to living reasonably.
Tim Underwood,
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Published: September 13, 2005 1:09 AM