Marines, Welfare, Gouging & Benevolence: More news & views on the tragedy in New Orleans

More news and opininion on the tragedy in New Orleans. Both news and opinion is that of others. First, The Marines are there, and Mark--in downtown New Orleans and reporting at The Interdictor LiveJournal--reports, "The city is starting to feel more secure now. Much larger military and Homeland Security presence and many fewer civilians left. Of course with this added security comes additional dangers like hyper-suspicious, armed authorities." Two steps forward, one step back.

Robert Tracinscki from The Intellectual Activist has a theory about what we have seen happen in New Orleans, and why the military presence is needed:

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster....Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

Read on here to see what he suggests caused it, or at least what perhaps exacerbated the natural disaster. Meanwhile, Julian Sanchez has got heartily sick and tired of "this spate of tiresome ruminations on how the hurricane is some sort of ultimate gotcha to deploy against the idea of small government."

This is all profoundly stupid. There is no deep overarching ideological point here, because for pretty much everyone short of the anarchists, preventing the collapse of civilization into a
huge Hobbesian clusterfuck makes the list—whether yours is short or long—of
things governments are supposed to do—state governments when feasible (assuming
adequate preparation on the ground is better than airlifts later), federal
government when it isn't...The real problem here sure looks like nothing more or less than a staggering display of ineptitude, which as the anti-matter doppelganger of mom, apple pie, and puppies, is pretty easy to oppose across ideological lines. By all means, let's hold officials at all levels accountable for how this has gone down, but spare us the pretended insights into the merits of mohair subsidies we're supposed to draw from all this.

And some more thoughts on price-gouging here from Steven Druckenmiller, to go with the thoughts I'd posted previously here in the discussions on petrol rationing. All make good economic sense -- Price Gouging Saves Lives argues David M. Brown for example, and so it can -- but sadly all fail to mention how the principle of benevolence might sometimes necessarily temper that hard sense, something Ruth argues for here. [Hat tip SOLO for some of these links.]