QSR10

Once again, how we finally react to a national tragedy of Katrina will say an awful lot about what kind of a country we are, and about what kind of a country we are destined to become.

On the one hand, private charities, corporations and individuals have ignored the talking heads and the hand wringers and moved in to do what needs to be done to get people back on their feet and functioning again. The Wall Street Journal has reported several times on these remarkable efforts:

The straightforward generosity of the corporate sector has been well reported. By last count, donations had exceeded $200 million. Besides cash, companies have handed out free drugs, suspended finance payments on cars and mortgages and helped emergency personnel with equipment. As interesting, though, has been the application of corporate best practices -- from supply-chain management to logistics -- to a natural disaster.

The private-sector planning began before Katrina hit. Home Depot's "war room" had transferred high-demand items -- generators, flashlights, batteries and lumber -- to distribution areas surrounding the strike area. Phone companies readied mobile cell towers and sent in generators and fuel. Insurers flew in special teams and set up hotlines to process claims.

This planning allowed the firms to resume serving customers in record time. Katrina shut down 126 Wal-Mart facilities; all but 14 are now open. Entergy, the power company for 1.1 million households and businesses that lost electricity, had restored electricity by Monday to 575,000 customers, including areas of flooded New Orleans.

Businesses offered near-instant support to their own employee-victims. Staff set up hotlines and began tracking down missing workers. Thousands of workplace victims were provided with places to stay, promises of continued pay and even offers of replacement jobs elsewhere in the country.

At the heart of the corporate response was a stunning array of advanced communications networks that kept firms in touch and coordinating. Following on last year's tsunami aid effort, the Business Roundtable had by August of this year arranged for each of its 160 member companies to designate a disaster relief point man. These folks were in place and ready to help before Katrina made landfall. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, through its non-profit Center for Corporate Citizenship, became a clearinghouse, fielding calls from many of its 3,000 state and local organizations and compiling lists of needed supplies.

By the weekend the Chamber's CCC was turbo-charging a new computer program, designed by tech firm i2, which served as a kind of bridal registry for needed relief supplies. Each donor company indicated what order it would fill, avoiding duplication or delay. IBM got to work on a computerized job bank to help place those who'd lost work. The American Trucking Association set up a Web site to update everyone on road conditions.

Companies then focused on doing what each did best. In some cases it was simply ramping up operations, as with Black & Decker, whose employees worked Labor Day weekend to churn out extra generators. In other cases, it was firms using their modern logistical skills to get into hard hit areas. FedEx and other delivery companies used computer systems with designed-in flexibility to reroute vehicles and adjust flights to get in aid. FedEx has already moved more than 100 tons of relief supplies.

Wal-Mart mined its vast databases of past purchases to compile lists of goods most desired after a hurricane. (Among the top items? Strawberry pop tarts.) Because of its advance logistics planning, the big retail chain was able to quickly move in to devastated areas with mini Wal-Marts to hand out goods. Other firms leveraged similar supply-chain capabilities; Pfizer dispensed pharmaceuticals via Wal-Mart and other retailers. "What companies do is solve problems," says Johanna Schneider, an executive director at the Business Roundtable.

These are the kinds of efforts that brought Chicago back after the fire and that brought San Francisco back after the earthquake. Both cities came back to life with a breathtaking alacrity. None would have succeeded had the government, at any level, been involved.

One of the hallmarks of “compassionate conservatism,’ at least as this writer understands it, is its commitment to prevent big government from getting in the way of the highest and best of our human impulses—“the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln so memorably framed it.

Whether from sheer incompetence, as in the case of the state and local authorities in Louisiana, or through a misplaced and in hindsight undeserved deference to them, as in the case of the federal authorities, the private sector has had a relatively free hand in doing what needs to be done. On can seek to do so for philosophical and moral reasons, as do I. But one can also look at history and advocate such an approach because any other approach is so ineffectual.

At the individual level, consider those who rode out the storm in their homes, and even now refuse to leave their abodes. Many, but far fewer than the hysterical mayor forecasted, paid with their lives for their intransigence. But others and most apparently, did not.

The decision to stay in their homes, , and to protect the most valuable property that most have—that shelter—was hardly an irrational one. The news stories of bands of looters are not ones with which we are unfamiliar; past experience from similar storms taught the good people of New Orleans well that if they valued their property they had better stand fast, stay and protect it, and with loaded weaponry if necessary (as it was).

It is true that these people did not have summer homes in neighboring states to retreat to, nor could they afford to stay for weeks on end in hotels. But what all of these kinds of lamentations most overlook is that, whether they could have afforded to have gone somewhere else or not, they definitely could not afford to lose their homes. And in that are they not just like us? Who among us could?

Even as we speak, these same hardy individuals are in New Orleans, cleaning up and repairing their homes, streets and surrounding properties and getting on with their lives. They are not waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Or worrying about myriad environmental hazards that may, or may not be there. Some, the “statists,” say they ought to be forced to leave. One social worker interviewed on NPR, not from the area, said that she lived for the experience of talking someone into leaving their home. It was what got her out of bed in the morning, that she could arm twist someone into leaving.

The local and state officials on the ground are hesitant to force anyone out. If these officials don’t want to do so, ought we to want to do so? Of course not. Give them the tools, if they need even our tools, and then get out of the way and let them do the job.

The response of private enterprise has also been astounding, and a potent reminder of what our ‘thousand points of light” are capable of, when the government stays out of the way. Wal-Mart, Ironically, one that is leading the way, Wal-Mart, ever since the last election has been in the cross hairs of Democratic Party activists and others for its low cost imports and allegedgly abusive labor practices, lead the way. The response of the corporate sectoralso has been “under the radar." None of these private enterprises sought government’s permission before providing basic necessities to victims of the storm, nor have the Main Stream Media provided them much coverage or credit for their efforts.

Hopefully, the state and local authorities, themselves now so obviously responsible for the diasters on the ground in the immediate wake of katrina, and the the levee break a day later, will continue to dither and blather and, most important of all, just stay out of the way. FEMA is on the ground and in control now, it appears, and to the extent that any overall direction is needed, let the federal government provide that structure and framework, and then the feds too hopefully will step aside and get out of the way.

Most horrific of all is what the radical left now is talking about imposing, which is a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority approach to rebuilding the entire region, as though it has been reduced to the pathetic condition of Depression-era Appalachia. Ted Kennedy took the lead on this trial lead balloon. Said Kennedy in a press release,

We cannot be an America of haves and have nots. We cannot be an America of 50 separate isolated states. As we rebuild the Gulf Coast, we must also come together to tackle these disparities. We must be a united America--one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. And when we say all, we mean all.

To address this challenge, our government must respond in ways that are as good and compassionate as the American people. We can't just fix the hole in the roof. We need to rebuild the whole foundation.

I propose that we create a New Orleans and Gulf Coast Redevelopment Authority modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority in its heyday. We should invest at least $150 billion in its actions to work with governors and mayors and citizens and communities to plan, help fund, and coordinate for the reconstruction of that damaged region. And it should help hire workers to put people back to work rebuilding their own communities and help them get back on their feet again.

Perhaps that the proposition has so distinguished a sponsor should comfort us beyond peradventure that nothing will come of it. It is further evidence though of how determined is the left to convert us into a socialist type planned economic system.

That “Ground Zero” in New York City looks much today as it did three and a half years ago is vivid testimony to the likely course of the kind of rebuilding effort that Kennedy would have us do. Indeed, parishes in and around New Orleans have been burned before waiting for aid to arrive from outside government authorities. Noted a story in this morning's New York Times:

The citizens of St. Bernard Parish - home until Hurricane Katrina to 67,000 predominantly white, middle-class people - were weary, fearful and, some of them, angry. They were as hard hit as New Orleans, they were saying, but got less attention and they wanted the world to recognize their plight and to help.

They had another reason to be angry, or at least skeptical. History again. In 1927, when the Mississippi River flooded, the leaders of New Orleans dynamited a levee, deliberately flooding St. Bernard and a neighboring parish to save the big city. Then the political establishment reneged on its promise to compensate the destroyed communities. The money never came.

This is a story that all residents of St. Bernard Parish know and can recite, and so they are nothing if not wary of outside politicians, the ones who are not their own local leaders.

They wonder just how much of the rebuilding money heading into the state will reach just plain folks like them after the elected officials, the lobbyists and the contractors take their shares.

"It's a way of life, it's the political way," explained a steamfitter. "Everybody gets his hand in somewhere along the line."

To bring back New Orleans, and the entire region for that matter, please don’t impose Soviet style central planning; our fellow citizens down there have suffered enough.

Instead, how about setting up a regional system of massive supply depots all over the region, where for a highly reduced cost anyone can bring in his or her pick up truck and haul away all the lumber, nails, roofing plaster board and bleach as they can carry.

To authenticate need, the driver would have to present nothing more than a clear set of photos of the property being restored, and its street address. All would be scanned and be entered on a confidential computer site. To get anything else, make the driver present little more than a set of the same photos originally sdubmitted, and updated photos showing restoration process and identify it to the same address. After one year, withdraw all such offers wand shut down the distribution centers. End of story.

New Orleans and everywhere else hit by Katrina would rise again, phoenix like, in a matter a months, and as good as or better than ever.