Brain Gain in New Orleans

The appended USA Today story shows what can be done by private initiative. There is very little need for government. The basic need for government is to insure there is order and rules for protecting persons and their property. As property values fell in New Orleans, new entrepreneurs saw opportunity. The free market works.

Here is a story about volunteers from outside New Orleans that has spent a year helping out. No government necessary, thank you. http://risingfromruin.msnbc.com/2007/08/superstars-in-t.html

The writer says government must do a better job in natural disasters. It is amazing that the Florida Seminole Indians survived hurricanes for centuries without FEMA.

We should stop paying the government Mafia and use private services. If the private provider does a poor job, the consumer can do something besides complain that the provider needs to do a better job. The consumer can change providers! Commercial and private property owners could hire private fire departments for less money than the government monopoly fire fighters cost. Insurance companies would see to it that their insured properties were built with the best materials. They would make sure smoke detectors and fire retardant chemicals are installed.

With cell phones, shift work, and younger retirees, there is no need for a government fire department whose employees retire young and collect a pension for 30 years, WITH a cost of living raise! The private sector retirees do not have a COLA in their private pensions. There are plenty of volunteers in each community who are willing to accept the challenge and the rewards from the community to prevent fires. No fire house is needed, but the community can and will eventually get one built, without taxing themselves to do so.

Health care and education all will be provided by the market if there is a need and a value to the consumer.

Despite all the hardships Louisiana has gone through since hurricane Katrina, Louisiana ranks fourth as the state with the fattest people in the United States.

Charles Tolleson

USA Today Mon Aug 27, 2007

Two years after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the Fort Pike Volunteer Fire Department in east New Orleans does not lack for firetrucks. Shortly after the storm, it received two, donated by non-profit groups.Now, if it could only get a fire station to put them in.The department's trucks sit out in the elements, reducing their life expectancy. Its firefighters operate out of their homes and a couple of trailers, while they plod through the tedium and frustration of getting federal help. Their experience is typical of the halting, uneven status of rebuilding in New Orleans.

Significant progress is being made, particularly with funds from non-profits and in cases where homeowners and small businesses can draw on their own money upfront. Some neighborhoods, particularly wealthier ones, have revived. But in much of the city, public facilities and lower-income communities still look storm-ravaged. The New Orleans police chief still operates out of a trailer. In the first three months of this year, the violent crime rate more than doubled over the previous year. Seven area hospitals, four of them public, remain closed, causing an acute shortage of health care services. Throughout much of the city, boarded-up homes still show Katrina's high-water mark, often well into their second floors. And in the Lower 9th Ward, a largely African-American community, it is possible to walk for blocks through erstwhile neighborhoods without seeing anything but tall grass and potholed streets. Tens of thousands of residents still live in trailers.

All of this would make for an unrelenting tale of woe, but for one thing: People are pouring into the city. For all that government is messing up, market forces and individual initiative are helping to right, albeit painfully slowly. In the past year, the population of New Orleans has grown from less than half the pre-Katrina level to more than two-thirds. Many new arrivals are young, idealistic and highly educated newcomers, drawn to the city by its uniqueness and undaunted by its problems.

The Times-Picayune, the city's daily newspaper, recently called the phenomenon New Orleans' "brain gain." Also pouring into the city are an impressive number of senior executives drawn to the challenges of building and rebuilding, rather than merely administering. Schools chief Paul Vallas, city recovery czar Edward Blakely and Tulane University medical school dean Benjamin Sachs are among a long list of nationally or internationally acclaimed professionals coming to New Orleans in recent months. Tulane's president, Scott Cowen, who hired Sachs, says he's getting more and better applicants than he did before Katrina. There are broader lessons in this. The most obvious is that government simply must do a better job the next time there is a natural, or man-made, disaster remotely approaching the scale of Katrina. All levels of government have failed to deliver. But perhaps the most disappointing has been the federal government, which has by far the most resources.


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