RECONSTRUCTION REDUX
Hurricane Katrina became a poster girl for libertarianism
BY KEN WARD

The media post-mortems over Hurricane Katrina have split, predictably, into those tired “red” and “blue” camps. But for Southerners stuck in the eye of the storm, such shaky constructs were blown away. In the heart of Dixie, Katrina became a poster girl for libertarianism. While know-it-all pundits pit George W. Bush vs. C. Ray Nagin vs. Kathleen Blanco, folks at ground zero see things differently these days. 

“There is a point to be made and the government doesn’t want to hear it,” says Robert Lloyd. “Free people consisting of common men and women can accomplish more and in a shorter time than any government.” Sacrilege, indeed.

Lloyd, of Fort Myers, Fla., walks the talk. He and Dan Gonzales of Wellington, Fla., staged a heroic relief effort that transported 80 tons of vital, life-saving food and material to the devastated town of Wiggins, Miss.

Starting with nothing but their cell phones and a loose network of friends Lloyd and Gonzales got their first two semi trucks rolling north within 48 hours — beating any government aid shipments.

“Our individual operation of private citizens provided the equivalent of 184,000 to 200,000 meals,” Lloyd figures. This was all done without any help from Washington, and oftentimes in spite of it.

While Lloyd’s ad-hoc group provided service where it was needed, agents from FEMA and assorted other federal bureaucracies just got in the way. 

On the road to Mississippi, the trucks were stopped and drivers were advised to turn back because there was no gasoline (partly because the government had commandeered all gas stations for its use). At some of the drop sites, Lloyd said FEMA crews even tried to seize materials or block “unauthorized” distribution.

Meantime, other federal agents were going door to door in the battered communities, grabbing weapons. Thankfully, the storm troopers’ inefficiency spared most law-abiding Mississippians from the mayhem that plagued New Orleans. 

“We dealt with looters a little differently,” said Mark Flemmons of Cleveland, Miss. “Once you shoot a few and leave their bodies laying in front of the store with their arms full of booty, the rest get the idea pretty quickly.”

When a Category 5 hurricane hits, the last thing you should count on is help from the bureaucracy. And while Mississippi Gov. Haley Barber is credited with doing a better job than his Louisiana counterpart (how could he have done worse?), Gulf Coast residents found that waiting on civil servants is a fool’s game.

“What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state,” says Robert Tracinski, who witnessed the chaos and carnage in New Orleans.

Rather that pulling people together, the storm unleashed the base, animalistic impulses of those conditioned to view life as a series of government-granted rights and entitlements. Naturally, the Big Easy became a gigantic Petri dish spawning social dysfunction. 

Lloyd encountered some of these pathologies in a predominantly black section of Wiggins, though without the violence.

Early on, his group identified a northwest neighborhood as one in the greatest need of relief. But when his truck arrived at the local fire station for the appointed drop, “no one would lift a finger to unload,” Lloyd said. “It never occurred to us that people would not help with their own emergency-relief supplies.”

That some prefer sleep over work might be a wake up call to libertarian theorists — or not. Either way, it demonstrates just how a stultifying bureaucracy can sedate the masses. Thankfully, most Southerners outside of corrupt backwaters like New Orleans still recognize this and recoil.

Still, die-hard statists like Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) have shamelessly tried to hijack Katrina as a vehicle to dispense even bigger handouts (“free” debit cards from Uncle Sam’s Club, anyone?). Misguided as they may be, count on support from patronizing politicians touting “bipartisanship” (again, revealing the falsity of the red-blue dichotomy).

Amid all the big talk out of Washington about “reconstruction,” true Southerners know safety and liberty are not found in more government programs, but fewer. Until Americans get that, the excesses and incompetence of a metastasizing public sector will dwarf Katrina’s carnage.

Commenting from the stinking cesspool of Louisiana’s rotten borough, Tracinski concludes: “The welfare state — and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages — is the man-made disaster. That’s the story no one is reporting.” LW

Ken Ward was assistant managing editor of the Las Vegas Sun and a freelance columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He writes from Florida. E-mail him at kenricward@juno.com.