The Real Katrina Disaster

You hear a lot of "the story that's not being reported" stories in the blogosphere -- and most of them are not reported for a good reason: They're not good stories. But this one is different.

Writing in The Intellectual Activist, Robert Tracinski makes the point that Katrina does not make sense as a natural disaster, because it is not a natural disaster, at least in New Orleans:

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

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 four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

Talk about a story Katie Couric or Jack Cafferty would beat back with a PC stick! But it is a vital story that should be told. Tracinski describes those who stayed in New Orleans:

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.

In all the coverage I've listened to or read outside of conservative talk radio, I've only heard one reference to evacuees being "third or fourth generation welfare families." Yet there they were by the thousands, completely stumped when faced with the need to do something on their own without government help. No problem-solving skills, no motivation, no independence. Yes, no money either -- but that's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

These brutalized sheep are the legacy of the Dem's war on poverty. The lengthy national debriefing that follows Katrina must include a discussion about the need to rebuild this population, just as we must rebuild the levees. And we're not going to do it by giving them money. The only thing that will work is weaning them from the dole.

Getting them out of the Big Easy and into some entrepreneurial cities may just be a great first step that they'll thank Katrina for later.

h/t Jim