The Welfare State in Action

What happened in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina was not a natural disaster,
writes
Robert Tracinski. It was man-made. Man-made over the last 40 years
of the welfare state.

What kind of people would not club together after a disaster to help each other?

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 speed away,
frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to
treat patients at the Superdome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction?
Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

Tracinski and his wife puzzled over this for a while, and then they realized what was going on.

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.

And of course, you would expect that the government of a welfare state city would
be incompetent. “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.”

It is going to be interesting to see whose “narrative” tells the story of the battle of New Orleans.
Will it be the incompetence of President Bush, the man who failed to get federal assistance into the
city within moments after the disaster? Or will it be the corruption and incompetence of the government
and the people of New Orleans? It will be up to the American people to decide.