Nice Work

Only four days ago, I scoffed. It looks like I got that one about as wrong as I could, and I'm happy to say so.

Fresh Water

My brother-in-law, Scott, and I spent the Labor Day weekend laboring: remodeling the bathroom in this house. It was a full-blast effort, which is why I've not written more than a couple of comments on other blogs here & there. All the major bits are done. Now, it's just me and a lot of time with the table-saw, detailing everywhere.


Naturally, the Katrina catastrophe is the story of the day. Almost just as naturally, everybody is saying everything, and very little of it makes sense. I could put up pointers here, but I'll get to that, and if you're getting around at all, you're seeing all of it anyway. And sensible people will realize that there are profound implications in all of this.

For now, I will only say that I am not surprised. The investment in government failure was enormous, and it has paid off handsomely.

Naturally.

Example -- read Walter Block carefully.

"I am not appalled with these failures. After all, it is only human to err. Were these levee facilities put under the control of private enterprise, there is no guarantee of zero human suffering in the aftermath of Katrina. No, what enrages me is not any one mistake, or even a litany of them, but rather the fact that there is no automatic feedback mechanism that penalizes failure, and rewards success, the essence of the market system of private enterprise.

Will the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board suffer any financial reverses as a result of the failure of their installations to prevent the horrendous conditions now being suffered by New Orleanians? To ask this question is to answer it.

One crucial step forward then, would be the privatization of this enterprise as part of the rebuilding process (if that indeed occurs; for more on this, see below). Perhaps a stock company could be formed; I suspect that the largest hotels, restaurants, universities, hospitals and other such ventures would have an incentive to become owners of such an enterprise."

Carefully, I said. And don't dodge anything. Keep principles in mind. (Whether you like it or not, this is boiler-plate immutable fact: government produces nothing. We do that. We do it all the way from tomatoes in the back yard to General Motors and General Electric -- this is known as "division of labor", kids -- to all the things that government merely takes from producers and then arbitrarily rearranges.) That's only one aspect of one element of Block's arguments.

You'd better read the whole thing.