How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

From ZNet:

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Forewarned that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. Thus does the invisible hand work its wonders in mysterious ways.

In New Orleans there would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island in 2004, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.5 million people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population. The Cubans lost 20,000 homes to that hurricane---but not a single life was lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.

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One of the students I teach in my entry level acting class came in wearing a gag "Nixon in '88" tee shirt last Thursday. Despite my liberalism and understanding of his crimes, I have a weird admiration for old Tricky Dick, which made me compliment my student's shirt. This led to a very brief conversation about politics--fearing that I might potentially alienate a pupil so early in the semester, I simply told him that I was actually conservative back in 1988, but now I'm very far to the left. "What about you?" I asked.

Great answer: "Man, I don't know. In my economics class I learned that some people think we should cut taxes to help business thrive, but others think we need to use tax money to help the needy. As far as what Bush is doing in those terms, I just don't get it one way or the other."

I responded that the truth about taxation and welfare was probably somewhere between the extremes, and that the Bush era has been making me reevaluate my understanding of conservatism: how can the Republicans possibly claim to be the party of fiscal restraint these days?

Despite our conversation's simplicity, I think we did a pretty good job of nailing down the central question in contemporary American politics: should we "tax and spend" or cut taxes and spending? Or, to make the question even more in line with current conservative thinking, should we cut taxes and increase spending? I think that the closing years of the 20th century made it pretty clear that the old, hardline ideolgies of absolute socialism and communism have been discredited as being ultimately impractical, although the reference above to Cuba's success with hurricane evacuation makes such an analysis somewhat problematic--actually, such a story makes a good point: despite overall failure, socialism has some good ideas. On the other hand, New Orleans' disasterous fending for itself for nearly a week after Katrina, coupled with Republicans' inability to abide by their own fiscal philosophy, show that there are serious flaws with the neo-liberal or "free market" ideology. That is, as with communism, absolute capitalism has also been discredited as being ultimately impractical. The problem is that our ruling class and media haven't yet figured it out; they're as blind as the old Soviet Politburo was in the days before Gorbachev.

So the problem facing America these days is twofold. First, we must, as a society, come to terms with the fact that the dominant economic ideology has severe problems in the real world. Second, after realizing that capitalism is just as flawed as communism, we must then figure out how to strike a working balance between freedom for money and meeting the needs of citizens. What I really want to know is when we're going to get serious about this, because, until then, American life is a big fucking joke.

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