Privatize, Privatize Everywhere, and not a Stop to Think

By Lee Russ

Saturday, September 10, 2005 at 08:52 AM

Speaking of Katrina & New Orleans, check out this great insight from "The State and the Flood," by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama]  http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/flood.html
"Can levees and pumps and disaster management really be privatized? Not only can they be; they must be if we want to avoid ever more apocalypses of this sort.  William Buckley used to poke fun at libertarians and their plans for privatizing garbage collection, but this disaster shows that much more than this ought to be in private hands. It is not a trivial issue; our survival may depend on it."

Say, do you suppose the Dutch floodgates which manage to keep out the Sea, are privatized? Is that why they work so much better than the New Orleans levees?  I think not.  I really, really think not.

I think Rockwell and his fellow believers, including all the folks at the Any Rand Institute, see what they want to see, that they find in all human events what they expect to find, simply because they would decline to see anything else.  My personal wish for them is
that they get to experience at least 10 years of living on the absolute edge of society, without any means to advance, without any means to aid those whom they love, in the midst of a society where affluence and wealth are continually jammed down their throats, and where people like Rockwell and the Any Randers tend to shift the blame to the character of the people involved.