The Finger-Pointing Will Start Coming Fast and Furious

Holman Jenkins writes today in Political Diary about the finger-pointing which is sure to follow the disaster in the South, especially New Orleans which is sucking up much of the attention despite having a lower loss of life than what occurred in Mississippi (though that may change).

Honey, I Shrunk the Big Easy

You can't lose a major city without fingers being pointed, and the last two years of President Bush's administration now will be darkened by accusations over the disaster in New Orleans. Rep. Bobby Jindal, an up-and-coming GOPer, has already sounded the sour note: "If we had been investing resources in restoring our coast, it wouldn't have prevented the storm but the barrier islands would have absorbed some of the tidal surge. People's lives are at stake. We need to take this more seriously."

In truth, at any point in the past 40 years, you could have found Louisiana and the federal government in a tug-of-war over who should foot the bill for the city's gamble on development in an exceedingly vulnerable topology. Two days before the storm, a Capitol Hill foodfight concerned whether the feds would pick up 50% or 75% of the tab for shoring up Louisiana's eroding coasts. Since the erosion may have been exacerbated by levees built by the feds to protect New Orleans from being washed away by the Mississippi, the feds should pay to fix the erosion too, argued Rep. David Witter. Sen. Mary Landrieu, for her part, appealed to the White House's presumed earth-raping inclinations by noting her state's permissive attitude toward offshore oil drilling. She argued: "While we are a producing state, we're not as wealthy as others that use our resources. We keep the lights on in Connecticut, New York and California." Inventive reasoning for why fixing New Orleans' problems is a federal responsibility has been nothing if not a Cajun specialty.

Expect the recriminations now to get ugly, proportional to the size of the catastrophe. In reality, however, everyone knew New Orleans was a disaster in the making. Federal and state officials long ago decided to protect the city from a Category 3 hurricane, choosing to let nature takes its course in the event of Category 4 or 5 storm. The term for this is "moral hazard." Implicitly, they knew they couldn't justify spending billions of U.S. taxpayer money to subsidize Louisianans to build in ill-advised places. They also knew, in the wake of the inevitable disaster, unlimited federal money would likely be available to rebuild in all the same spots. This is the reason you can't buy commercial flood insurance. "Private insurers will not offer private flood coverage because typically these stories replay themselves over and over again," says Robert Hartwig, chief economist for the insurance industry's Washington trade group.

Congress does not heed such basic lessons about incentives and human behavior, however. Subsidies to build and rebuild are forthcoming partly because the rich and influential populate waterfront areas. If somebody tried to build New Orleans from scratch today, he might be jailed as a wetlands molester, but he wouldn't be denied subsidized federal flood insurance. In rebuilding, it would be nice if federal subsidies at least weren't made available for rebuilding in areas below sea level. New Orleans could then go back to being the "Crescent City," as it was known before its central marshlands were drained to allow hotels and high-rises at elevations five or ten feet lower than the river and bay (called a "lake") just a few hundred yards away.

The left is already clinging to this disaster like a floating refugee in the hopes that this will be the thing that brings down the Bush Administration. Wishful thinking, at best. If you build a city in the way New Orleans did, you're betting against nature, and it's a bet they finally lost. They'll be plenty of blame for everyone.

The question is, once everything dries out, will they be allowed to rebuild in the same places as before? Probably yes, which means this will all happen again someday.

As an interesting aside, Stacy Harp points out that the disaster occurred just a few days before the start of "Southern Decadence", a huge homosexual event in New Orleans. Some on the wacky religious right are giving God "credit" for stopping the event with a Biblical judgment. I agree with Stacy that this kind of ranting is neither Biblical nor sensible, and certainly does nothing to advance the cause of Christianity. If this was the way God did things, San Francisco and Laguna Beach would have been rubble long ago.