Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

The Future Of Freedom

If you follow Garvey's Ghost then you've noticed that I haven't said peep about Katrina. There's a couple of reasons for this primary among them is that allmost everywhere you look you'll see commentary on it much of which I agree with, so I wouldn't really be educating anyone about anything. The other reason is kind of the reason for this my 301st post at Garvey's Ghost:

Private individuals should not be or feel compelled to give a single buck to the relief effort.

This particular mode of thought will probably piss not a few readers off, but if you wait a bit I'll explain. This administration has wasted over $200 billion in a fake and unneccessary war in Iraq. The government should be compelled to spend at least that amount on New Orleans without any extra monies from private individuals. In my opinion, monetary and other material donations amounts to a tax on the people for doing what our taxes should be going to.

Let us turn our attention to an article by the Future of Freedom Foundation entitled: The Deadly Legacy of the Welfare State Lies in New Orleans. Here the author proposes that the failure of the government to properly respond to Katrina is evidence that Socialism nee "Big Government (tm)" is bad.

Quote:
Among the most tragic scenes in the Hurricane Katrina disaster was that of the thousands of poor people — almost all of whom were African Americans — who were stranded at the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center, desperately waiting for the federal government to come and save them.

Why were they stuck there when thousands of others had already left the city? Because they were too poor to save themselves from death and disaster. They lacked the money to drive out of town and get a motel room for a few days before the hurricane struck.

Leftists are now saying that the New Orleans disaster shows that federal-government assistance to the poor and needy is more necessary than ever.

What in the world could leftists be thinking? It is leftist economic ideology — reinforced unfortunately by modern-day conservative “reform” philosophy — that is responsible for the horrible economic plight in which the New Orleans poor find themselves.

After all, don’t forget: The economic situation in New Orleans comes 70 years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt converted the federal government into a welfare provider for the poor and needy. Under FDR, the primary purpose of the federal government became to relieve poverty through the coercive confiscation of wealth from “the rich” in order to redistribute the money to “the poor.” This was the era in which Americans witnessed the advent of Social Security, a bankrupt tax-and-transfer program that ultimately became the crown jewel of the socialistic welfare state.

Thirty years after the New Deal came Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, in which Johnson declared “war on poverty” all across America. Here we saw the advent of Medicare and Medicaid along with hundreds of other federal programs whose supposed aim was to abolish poverty, once and for all.

Decade after decade, the federal government became a massively growing tax-and-spend engine that sucked trillions of dollars of income and savings out of the pockets of the American people in order to fund ever-growing federal programs to “help the poor.”...

...New Orleans is proof positive of the bankruptcy of leftist economic ideology. For it is the welfare state itself and its 70-year-old FDR–LBJ federal “war on poverty” that have left those tens of thousands of people in New Orleans penniless, waiting for the federal government to come save, feed, transport, and house them. What leftists don’t want to face is that it is their beloved socialistic welfare state itself that has doomed tens of thousands of people in New Orleans — and elsewhere — to a life of poverty and governmental dependency.

To the untutored this argument seems to make a whole lot of sense. The government cannot be expected to help everyone so it should help no one. And If people didn't have to pay taxes, they could save and invest that extra 500 bucks a year. I mean you really have to ignore the fact that the $500 bucks a year won't really amount to much after oh 30 years, only $15,000. I guess the FFF believes you and I can live off of that after we retire, unless we're not to retire. But oh, this is really off point. Katrina demonstrates the deadly falibilty of socialism. Or does it?

Well see, there is this Island called Cuba. On this island is a socialist leader named Fidel Castro. He and the government he runs is, well, Socialist! But it gets better. This island, which has faced as many if not more hurricanes than the U.S. and they have had no where near the numbers of deaths as the US. Lets us not forget that this island is still under an embargo imposed by the U.S. and it has a MUUUUCh lower tax base than the US and yet and still it has what is considered the best system for evacuating residents of areas threatened with flooding and other ills from Hurricanes. So with a single example we show the Future of Freedom Foundation to be full of cow excrement.

While I agree that the black residents of NO should have beem prepared for such an event (perhaps a group of neighbors could have put a stash together for a rental van and a trip to a hotel room for a few days). And perhaps not a few of them need to adjust their belief systems and "Act like they know" and stop acting like an Angel is going to stand up in front of thier home and part the waters. But the FFF is just outg of order to suggest that the residents of NO could not and should not have expected the government to do what it is formed to do: Preserve the common good and provide services to its residents. Services that include disaster recovery and prevention.

Ultimately we see the FFF and other conservative outlets for what they are: They want to cut off everybody under the guise of " Do for self." Like Walter 'Willy" Williams they participate in quasi-socialist organizations such as Health Insurance, Auto Insurance and soon, Social Security. They expect their auto insurance company to pick up the tab for the thousands of Dollars in Damage done to the vehicle they leased, even though they haven't paid in the cost of the car.
They want their health insurance to cover the multiple thousands in hospital bills for their stay, but haven't put in anywhere near that amount.

So yes, the FFF is full of it and a little bit of research would have prevented that article from being posted. But when you only see what you want to see, that's all you see.

Links:

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0509a.asp