Leaving the Poor Behind

Critics of the president are shocked that in the evacuation of New Orleans before hurricane Katrina the
poor were left behind. Said Senator Kennedy: “those people who had cars and money got out,
and those people who were impoverished died.”

Well, Senator, and whose fault is that?

The ground theme of the conservative movement of the last half-century is that if you encourage
helplessness, and sustain helpless people in their helplessness with programs and pensions, as the
welfare state does, then you will increase the number of people who are “impoverished.”

New Orleans, according to Brendan Miniter,
is a poster child for the welfare state.

The welfare state failed the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and other
flooded New Orleans neighborhoods long before the levees gave way. This gets us back
to the question Sen. Kennedy wants Judge Roberts to answer about whether to adopt
a narrow view that prevents real progress from taking place. And it also explains
the role Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco--both Democrats--played in leaving
mostly poor, minority
citizens in a city that was clearly descending into chaos.

So let us ask another question. How could, how in the name of the poor that
have voted for Democrats ever since the dawn of time, how could Democratic politicians
like Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco have left the poor to perish in New Orleans?

We know the answer to that. The fact is that the Democrats instinctively like the poor to be
concentrated in the inner cities and helpless. If they were prosperous and
self-reliant, they would move out and start voting for Republicans, and we can’t have that.

So how are we going to help the people left behind next time? Writes Miniter:

Are we going to try another big-government program and expect better results
this time? Or are we now going to realize that ownership is the most likely path to the middle
class? School vouchers can help poor parents take ownership of their children’s education and
finally break the grip teachers unions have on the public schools. Health savings accounts and
private accounts for Medicaid and Social Security will give those on the lower rungs of the
economic ladder the skills as well as the assets necessary to climb higher. In late August
the levees broke in New Orleans. But the welfare
state had left the poor stuck in the mud long before that.

Amen to that.

More Liberal Brainwashing at the University

The stories keep trickling out. About the astonishing culture of liberal postmodernism in the university.
About how it is enforced with the threat of shame and the power of employment. Here is the latest
installment from a Resident Assistant at a Catholic university somewhere in America,
“Athena Kerry.”

“Athena” tells of the hiring process she went through to become a Resident Assistant at a residence
hall. The applicants were invited to design a residence hall. A couple of design requirements tipped
off the agenda.

How do you address the needs of non-Christian students who may need worship space? and

How would you encourage any students who may not support GLBTQA to become "persons of care"?

Well now. Imagine the powers at any university ever giving a single thought to the needs
of conservative Christian students for worship space. Why the very idea! Our universities have spent
the last half-century erecting every possible barrier they can imagine to marginalize Christianity at
the university. And now they are concerned about “non-Christian students who may need worship space?”

The RAs don’t like it, but they have been effectively cowed.

The few of us RAs that have banded together — all female, the men
say nothing, perhaps because many are themselves gay — quietly whisper "hypocrisy" in
back corners of basement apartments.
But any more than that threatens our employment.

Perhaps the men say nothing because they have taken the advice given to the Roman emperor Claudius by
his trusted friend in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.
“Trust No-one! Not even me!” Certainly trust no-one at the university. You never know when they might be induced
to inform upon you.

Imagine the Pulitzers, the fame, the patents of nobility that would be trotted out for a liberal
that exposed such goings-on at a conservative university or at a big corporation!

Can Blogs Challenge the MSM on Katrina?

Sunday headline in
The New York Times: “Federal Authorities Hesitated — Local Officials
Were Overwhelmed.” Yes, the poor little local officials. The whole thing was just too big for them.
And the newsweeklies are echoing the MSM line.

Can the conservative blogs change the story? That is, can they change the story from
the current MSM groupthink that Bush failed and make the MSM’s shoddy reporting the story?

Blogger Jeff Goldstein
fisks the newsweekly coverage which is full of excuses for Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin but
ruthless in condemning Bush’s leadership style. We are to believe that

The feds are responsible for the failure. Bush failed to anticipate that
the City of NO wouldn’t follow its plan (what there was of one), that the Governor didn’t
understand her function in the chain of command, and then — once he did know — his management style
prevented him from wresting control of the state from Blanco.

As The New York Times says, local authorities were overwhelmed, poor dears, because the
dog ate their homework. Goldstein continues:

Of course, to believe Newsweek’s narrative attempt to frame the
disaster this way, one has to believe, as Newsweek apparently does, that the Federal
government is the only real government, and that the President and federal
agencies are — or need to be — in control of all local disasters.

So if the Federal government is “the only real government” does that mean there should be
a single national policy, dictated by the federal government, on, say, gay marriage?
Or is that where federalism and states rights kick in?

Enquiring minds would like to know.

The Meaning of New Orleans

What is the meaning of Hurricane Katrina? That is the big question as we move from the shock battle
of the blame game to the aftermath. And there is nobody better equipped to provide guidance than
the American philosopher Lee Harris, who writes for
TechcentralStation.com.
In three articles this week, Harris unpacks the hurricane aftermath with the practiced hands
of a man who has studied philosophy and has also lived life. In doing so he penetrates to the heart of
the problem that conservatives must deal with: uncertain place where reason and emotion fight for control.

In The Meeting of Rage and Reason Harris
writes of his rage at the incompetent and uncertain government response to the hurricane. But many people
did not respond as he did. Some of them did not feel his rage at all.
“Some friends went so far as to scold me for my loss of emotional self-control.
Some even accused me of responding irrationally.” Readers who know their Harris knew what was coming next:
“The German philosopher Hegel once said that no great thing has ever been done without passion.” Logic
and reason are all very well in their place. But don’t look for logicians to save you from the flood.

Think twice before you demean the rage that sometimes simply overwhelms our rational
judgment -- it may be one of those tricks by which a higher rationality has managed to make itself
manifest in the actual world around us. In short, it may exemplify what Hegel called
"the cunning of reason" -- namely reason’s ability to use even our most irrational impulses
to fulfill its own loftier purposes.

Next, in The State of Nature in New Orleans: What Hobbes Didn’t Know Harris takes apart
Hobbes’s famous apothegm that life in the state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Not in state-of-nature New Orleans it wasn’t. People weren’t wandering around “solitary.” Not at all.

If you step back and look at what really happened in New Orleans, the fact will
jump out at you that human beings, instead of running around solitary and alone, immediately
clumped together into gangs and groups, of two fundamental divergent types:
one purely aggressive, and the other purely defensive.

Mankind is, even in the state of nature, a social animal.

But what about the rest of Hobbes’s list? Was life in state-of-nature destined to be “poor, nasty, brutish, and short?”
Yes. It probably would be, for the group of people that were weak. But the robber bands of the
ruthless and aggressive young men were having a grand old time. Life for them was great, just as it
was thousands of years ago for Xenophon and his Ten Thousand on their march out of Persia back to Ancient Greece. How did this band of ruthless
men sustain themselves on the march?

They support themselves by capturing men, boys, girls, and women, herding them
together and selling them at the next slave market they come to, in order to buy provisions
for themselves. Does anyone feel the slightest guilt about it? No -- none at all. Not more
guilt than the young
looters and rapists of New Orleans felt during their rampage.

In the state of nature, the powerful fatten themselves upon the poor, and make them into slaves.
Life for them is great.

Finally, Harris wonders about the political impact of the government incompetence in
Katrina and the Political Waves. After 9/11 we gave the government enormous powers to
save us from the terrorists. But what good was all that power after Katrina? Americans got
to see on our TVs a parade of incompetents that did not know how to deploy the power and
the resources that we had
given them to keep us safe.

Katrina will have a profound impact on the way Americans think about their
government, just as 9/11 did -- only Katrina will almost certainly move public opinion in
the opposite direction from the way 9/11 moved it --
with consequences that are, for the moment, foreseeable.

It would certainly be wonderful if the American people, for once, decided they wanted the
government to have less power rather than more. But don’t count your chickens yet.

Sticking up for Price Gougers

The first thing that the media and camera-hungry politicians look for after a national
disaster are price gougers.
Woe betide the evil gas stations that put prices up when
supplies tighten! The reporters and politicians are shocked by the greed of the price gougers.
How could they do it?

Thanks for nothing, pal. When I went to my local Arco gas station, on Friday September 2, the
price was nobly unchanged from before the unundation of New Orleans, but what use was that? A
battalion of TV watchers had descended on the gas station and pumped every last gallon of gas into
their cars before I got there. So I got none. Fortunately, there were no evil price gougers in sight.
But evil gas hoarders had scarfed up all the precious
gasoline to top off their tanks. How could they?

So what is fair? To reward the hoarders who rush out and pump gas into
their cars before the price goes up? Or to raise the price to make the hoarders pay for their greed, and
keep the gas station open, providing gasoline for consumers at some price, however obscene.

Most people seem to forget that the reason we have an abundance of goods and services at our
disposal is that their producers and middlemen get to charge whatever price they want. Sometimes,
they put goods on sale (so consumers get to do some price gouging) and sometimes they raise prices (so
producers get to do some price gouging.) The point is that by letting producers adjust prices
according to market demand, we always have
goods and services available for purchase.

What about the carpenter who travels to New Orleans to help rebuild the city, asks
John Stossel? Is he a price gouger if he charges above the going rate for carpenters
in New Orleans before the flood? Hardly. It’s going to cost him a bundle to move to New Orleans and
provide his services there. He’s going to want to be handsomely rewarded for his labor and for
disrupting his family for months.

Any tradesman who treks to a disaster area must get higher pay than he
would get in his hometown, or he won’t do the trek. Limit him to what his New Orleans
colleagues charged before the storm,
and even a would-be hero may say, "the heck with it."

So is he evil for demanding more? On the contrary.

It’s the price "gougers" who bring the water, ship the gasoline, fix
the roof, and rebuild the cities. The price "gougers" save lives.

But that’s not what we Americans want to hear. We resent paying more for goods that are suddenly
in short supply. And we want someone to blame.

Get Your Education Myths Here

We all know a lot about schools. We know they are underfunded. We know that
teachers are underpaid. And we know that Johnny can’t read.

Actually, write
Jay P. Greene & Marcus A. Winters, we’re wrong.

Schools aren’t underfunded. Anything but.

In fact, public K-12 spending is approaching $10,000 per pupil
— double what it was three decades ago, adjusting for inflation. And total
school spending is approaching $500 billion — more than we spend on national
defense ($454 billion) and
more than the entire GDP of Russia ($433 billion).

That means, if you prefer to look at it that way, that K-12 soaks up about five percent of GDP, about
the same level for the last 20 years. Want more?

Many people believe that teachers are horribly underpaid.
In fact, the average elementary-school teacher makes $30.75 per hour,
more than architects ($26.64), mechanical
engineers ($29.46), and chemists ($30.68).

Why do we have these wildly inaccurate ideas about education? It’s
partly because we all think we are education experts. But the main problem
is the propaganda machine of the education industry.

Unfortunately, teachers unions, school-board associations, and others
with a financial stake in education policy take advantage of our vulnerability
to myths about education. While most of us feel comfortable entrusting our
children to their teachers at school each day, the interest groups that
represent them and their schools do not warrant our trust. Teacher unions and the rest of the education establishment, like other interest groups, will support claims that advance their agendas regardless of
whether those claims are based on facts or myths.

And until we understand the real facts about education, our children will suffer.

Guardian Leftie Bails on Schroeder

You’d think that the chaps at Britain’s lefty Guardian would love German Chancellor Schröder.
He’s as solid a Social Democrat as you could imagine. He’s defending the European “social model” from
the evil forces of Anglo-American globalization. He’s earned standing “O”s for his strident (and
convenient) anti-Americanism. So why is
Martin Kettle bailing out on the Unions-Kanzler?

Well, it’s because of a personal failure of leadership, whatever that means.

The SPD’s central failure has been its inability to provide a
coherent social-market-based
answer to the problems posed for the nation state by globalisation.

Well that’s a thought! The problem is, of course, that there is no coherent social-market-based answer
to the problems posed by globalization. The whole idea of the social market is to ignore the
market and promise big fixed benefits and pensions to your supporters when you don’t have a clue
whether you will ever be able to pay those benefits without bankrupting the nation.

Actually, the Social Democrats in Germany and elsewhere do have a coherent plan to solve
the problems posed by globalization. It is to retreat
as slowly as possible, pretending that they are delivering on their promises while slowly withdrawing
them, bit by bit.

But the laugh is on Kettle. Recent news indicates that the German economy is finally starting
to perk up after 15 years in the doldrums. Wage costs are down and exports are up. It’s all probably
due to Germany’s famous “Mittelstand,” the medium-sized business that dominate Germany’s exports.
If Angela Merkel wins the election and becomes Chancellor then
she will get the credit for the economic upswing that is already in progress.

Does Martin Kettle really want that?