The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong. The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view. [...] What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

[...] 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. 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. ["An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State", TIA, Sept. 1 2005]

The key question every time there is a natural disaster is not, "How did this happen?" Nature is dangerous, and it is always causing a disaster for someone, somewhere. Nor is the question, "Who is to blame?" There is always something more that could have been done to protect this or that place--at an expenditure of millions or billions, against a risk that could not be predicted. The only really important question after a disaster is: "How are we going to recover?" [...] The 1900 Storm is still the deadliest natural disaster in US history, with estimates of lives lost ranging between 8,000 to 12,000. It utterly destroyed and almost entirely flooded the island city of Galveston, Texas, and killed 6,000 of its inhabitants. This is the story of the rebuilding of Galveston after the storm.

"For while the story that began Sept. 8, 1900, is one about the fate of people at the hands of nature, it's also one about people altering their own fates by changing the face of nature.... Despite the unimaginable devastation and what must have been a hard realization that it could happen again, the city immediately began pulling itself out of the mud....Residents of Galveston quickly decided that they would rebuild, that the city would survive, and almost as soon, leaders began deciding how it would do so."

"The two civil engineering projects leaders decided to pursue--building a seawall and raising the island's elevation--stand today and are almost as great in their scope and effect as the storm itself.... The feat of raising an entire city began with three engineers hired by the city in 1901 to design a means of keeping the gulf in its place.... Along with building a seawall, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and HC Ripley recommended the city be raised 17 feet at the seawall and sloped downward at a pitch of one foot for every 1,500 feet to the bay.... The first task required to translate their vision into a working system was a means of getting more than 16 million cubic yards of sand--enough to fill more than a million dump trucks--to the island.

[...] McComb sums it up about as well as it can be: "Human technology made it possible - for the city of Galveston to remain on such unstable land. The city did not flourish. Houston - left the island city far behind. Galveston simply survived. "The public defenses against nature came at a high cost, but they succeeded for the most part. Its struggle for survival against nature through the application of technology represents the strongest tradition of Western civilization. Galveston's response to the great storm was its finest hour."  [http://www.1900storm.com/rebuilding/]

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. [...] There seems to be some confusion in terms of terminology on TV. People with no food and water who are walking into supermarkets and taking food and water off the shelves are not criminal, they are sane. They are not looters, they are people who are attempting to survive; they are taking the basics of survival off shelves in stores where there isn't even anyone at the cash register. Looters are not looking to survive; they're looking to take advantage of the weakness of others. They are predators. They're taking not what they need but what they want. They are breaking into stores in New Orleans and elsewhere and stealing flat screen TVs and jewelry, guns and CD players. They are breaking into homes and taking what those who have fled trustingly left behind. In Biloxi, Miss., looters went from shop to shop. "People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they're Santa Claus," the owner of a Super 8 Motel told the London Times. On CNN, producer Kim Siegel reported in the middle of the afternoon from Canal Street in New Orleans that looters were taking "everything they can."

This story from the AP describes the scene.

With much of the city flooded by Hurricane Katrina, looters floated garbage cans filled with clothing and jewelry down the street in a dash to grab what they could. In some cases, looting on Tuesday took place in full view of police and National Guard troops. At a Walgreen's drug store in the French Quarter, people were running out with grocery baskets and coolers full of soft drinks, chips and diapers. When police finally showed up, a young boy stood in the door screaming, "86! 86!" - the radio code for police - and the crowd scattered. Denise Bollinger, a tourist from Philadelphia, stood outside and snapped pictures in amazement. "It's downtown Baghdad," the housewife said. "It's insane. I've wanted to come here for 10 years. I thought this was a sophisticated city. I guess not."

Around the corner on Canal Street, the main thoroughfare in the central business district, people sloshed headlong through hip-deep water as looters ripped open the steel gates on the front of several clothing and jewelry stores. One man, who had about 10 pairs of jeans draped over his left arm, was asked if he was salvaging things from his store. "No," the man shouted, "that's EVERYBODY'S store."

Looters filled industrial-sized garbage cans with clothing and jewelry and floated them down the street on bits of plywood and insulation as National Guard lumbered by. Mike Franklin stood on the trolley tracks and watched the spectacle unfold. "To be honest with you, people who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society," he said. A man walked down Canal Street with a pallet of food on his head. His wife, who refused to give her name, insisted they weren't stealing from the nearby Winn-Dixie supermarket. "It's about survival right now," she said as she held a plastic bag full of purloined items. "We got to feed our children. I've got eight grandchildren to feed."

What's interesting about this story is what it reveals about man's need for a moral sanction. Men will not act without some sense that what they're doing is right. I don't mean that men automatically act according to what they believe is moral -- I mean that even when they act against their knowledge of the good, they have to evade that knowledge and find a rationalization to justify it. (Notice, here, the usefulness of altruism in providing such rationalizations.) Man's psychological need for a moral sanction is so strong that even criminals can't escape it. The most vicious criminals, rapists and child molesters included, will go to fantastic lengths to convince themselves that their actions are in some sense noble.

[P]eople who are raiding stores for food and other necessities in order to survive during an emergency are doing nothing wrong. That's true, but even there, once life returns to normal, they have an obligation to repay the stores (or at least offer to). The same holds true for any emergency. It is proper to do what you have to do in order to survive, but if that involves violating someone's rights, then once you have weathered the emergency, you owe them the appropriate restitution.

NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - Rescuers raced to reach stranded survivors of Hurricane Katrina as authorities battled to stop looters taking control of the stricken city of New Orleans. With authorities estimating hundreds of dead from Monday's storm -- and not even bothering to recover bodies from the floods, news that floodwater levels had stabilised offered scant relief as the enormous scale of the crisis became apparent. ... US National Guard troops early Thursday girded for a mission to stem rising anarchy in looting-hit New Orleans, as authorities tried to stop the situation spiralling out of control. "The National Guard is quickly hoping to turn its mission to more law enforcement," Bob Mann, spokesman for Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, told reporters in a late night briefing.

While people are still dying in Louisiana and Mississippi, the New York Times comes out with an appalling editorial and this article, gloating about how the destructive power of Hurricane Katrina is nature's "revenge" against man for the hubris of believing that he can control nature. Keep these on file as a reminder of the real meaning of environmentalism: hatred of man.

"Since the 18th century..., people have been trying to dominate the region's landscape and the forces of its nature.... Although early travelers realized the irrationality of building a port on shifting mud in an area regularly ravaged by storms and disease, the opportunities to make money overrode all objections. When most transport was by water, people would of course settle along the Mississippi River, and of course they would build a port city near its mouth. In the 20th century, when oil and gas fields were developed in the gulf, of course people added petrochemical refineries and factories to the river mix, convenient to both drillers and shippers. To protect it all, they built an elaborate system of levees, dams, spillways and other installations.... In the last few decades, more and more people have realized what a terrible bargain the region made when it embraced--unwittingly, perhaps--environmental degradation in exchange for economic gains." ["After Centuries of 'Controlling' Land, Gulf Learns Who's the Boss," Cornelia Dean and Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, August 30]

While the "flat tax" has been pretty much dead for the past decade in the US, it has been adopted in one country after another overseas, a process outlined in the article linked to below. While the flat tax is no cure-all--it is often justified as a way of increasing tax revenues--it represents a rejection of the egalitarian premise behind "progressive" tax rates.

"The World Is Flat," John Fund, Opinion Journal, August 29

"Next month's report of the White House tax reform commission will likely stop short of advocating a complete scrapping of the tax code. But look for it to have warm words for how well the flat tax is promoting economic growth in the more than dozen places--ranging from Ukraine to Hong Kong--that have adopted variations of it.... It's increasingly popular overseas, with Romania and the republic of Georgia adopting it last January.... Even Germany, normally a center of intellectual stagnation when it comes to tax policy, has gotten the bug.... Flat-tax pioneer Estonia is even reducing its rate by two percentage points a year until it drops to 20% in 2007.... Alvin Rabushka, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, believes it's only a matter of time before an emerging economic superpower like China or India goes the flat-tax route. His book on the subject has just been published in Chinese, with a preface by Lou Jiwei, the vice minister of finance."

(See also today's Daily Telegraph at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/08/29/do2902.xml.)

Washington, D.C.—U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion in Kelo v. City of New London upholding eminent domain for private development, said during a speech last week that the result in the case is one "I would have opposed if I were a legislator," the New York Times reported today.

In a speech to the Clark County Bar Association in Las Vegas, Stevens noted that the result of his majority opinion in Kelo is "entirely divorced from my judgment as concerning the wisdom of the program" to take homes for private development.  "My own view is that the free play of market forces is more likely to produce acceptable results in the long run than the best-intentioned plans of public officials," he said.

While Stevens reiterated his belief that eminent domain for economic development is constitutional under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, he noted that as a matter of policy, the result in Kelo is "unwise."

"Legislators should take up Justice Stevens on his invitation and advice to end eminent domain abuse," said Scott Bullock, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which represents the New London homeowners.  "In his majority opinion, Justice Stevens invited states to set stricter standards for the use of eminent domain and now he points out that eminent domain abuse is indeed ‘unwise.'  When even the author of the Kelo opinion believes that eminent domain abuse is bad policy, it is clearly time for legislators to act to protect home and small business owners from condemnation for private development."

"Eminent domain abuse is unconstitutional, bad policy and just plain wrong," said IJ Senior Attorney Dana Berliner.  "Justice Stevens still has the law wrong: ‘public use' never has and never should include taking homes and businesses for ordinary private development that may or may not produce more jobs and tax revenue.  But in acknowledging that eminent domain is a poor means of achieving economic development, he has issued an important call for real reform."

Following the Supreme Court's ruling, the Institute for Justice and its Castle Coalition grassroots arm launched a $3 million Hands Off My Home campaign.  The campaign supports eminent domain reform at the state and local level and equips ordinary Americans with the means to protect their homes, small businesses and churches from eminent domain for private profit.  Learn more at www.castlecoalition.org.