Let's Not Wash Them Away

It seems pretty simple to us: the government messed up. A destructive hurricane blew through and the government could not deal with damage left in its wake because said government was in the midst of an ill-advised reorganization of it emergency services. Everyone was on vacation, no one was in charge, and the result was an unthinkable dereliction of duty. So it goes.

Now, to the rebuilding.

New Orleans, as we all know now from watching the news, had a lot of poor people in it. Not surprisingly, the poorest parts of the city were the places where the levies broke. Now, we hear subtle and not-so-subtle rumblings, instructing those poor people: Don’t come back, they say. Let’s create some “special economic zones” on the Gulf Coast and really get the economy moving.

These pro-business, pro-development, libertarian voices want a new New Orleans, a nice place to visit. No more poor people. Fewer black people. Let the private sector create a business-friendly environment, they say. (By “private sector,” they mean “whichever contractors happen to have the ear of whichever Senate staffer is writing the appropriations bill next year.”) And why not? What were the poor people doing for their city, besides living in it?

Better to let them stay in Houston, find work there with the doing-just-fine-thank-you oil industry, and give New Orleans away piece by piece, crony by crony. It’s the spirit of free enterprise.

Or maybe, just maybe, we could repave the streets, invest in some low-rise housing projects, build schools where the plumbing works and the teachers don’t have to buy school supplies themselves, and wire the whole city for free broadband internet access. Then we could invite everyone who left to not be washed away, to stay in their home, and leave the special economic zones where they belong, in China. Our whole country should be a special economic zone.