As always, sources of information I encountered while researching this post are at the bottom of the post.

Now, the focus of my Katrina series must shift to the sweeping ideological and political implications of the hurricane. Rita, as it is now understood, unleashed most of its destruction in Louisiana, inundating the city of Lake Charles and flooding entire parishes adjacent to New Orleans. Rita has been used to flog Louisiana in a second sense also, that of invalid comparisons between the Texas city government's success in evacuating residents (a "success" that was, of course, not tested, and whose implementation was a foregone conclusion well in advance) and the New Orleans' city government's failure to make the right guess. However, that's already been addressed; so we turn at last to Katrina's second cruelty, that of rentseeking.

In personal conversations with friends about the state of general administrative turpitude gripping our nation, I've made myself tedious repeating that the movement conservatives draw their strength from the ranks of business. In the past, the ranks of top GOP and Democrate leadership were filled by patriarchs accustomed to dishing out patronage; parochial in outlook, they nevertheless came from proud traditions and had a sense of general concern for the common weal. Then came massive industrial recession in the USA, as virtually every developed nation on earth surpassed us at once in virtually every one of our core industries. Within the space of a few years, the USA was transformed into a very large Argentina; gradually, as the very largest industrial enterprises lost sales to foreign competitors, and virtually every single industrial occupation became a battlefield with foreign enterprise, management struggled to regain the dignity of an army being defeated slowly, through the mass adoption of Japanese efficiency methodologies.

Most of these methodologies had little to do with either Japan or efficiency, of course; rather, managers learned how to delegate the management of their firms to underlings, preferably in supplier firms. Management itself increasingly mimicked the Coasian theory of the firm, in which economic activity consists of nothing more than hydraulically "mixing" factors of production like martinis; managers were, in this sense, identical to commodity traders, except that they used their firm's monopsony power to force suppliers to sell lower and retailers to buy dearer. In short, managers erst had been totemic shamans of a thorougly antiquated, class-ridden quasi-political distribution of cargo; now they had an abjectly predatory relationship to employees, other ranks of management, retailers or customers, and the machinery of government.

I'm not sure if it's entirely ironic that, at this time, public choice theory became such an apposite characterization of the behavior of public officials or thir surrogates, chartered firms (One of the more demented convictions of mine is that corporations are, indeed, a type of extension of state agency that deliberately bypasses the machinery of government). This argues that political actors have a personal utility function which is necessarily at odds with the public welfare function:

Library of Economics & Liberty: Public choice takes the same principles that economists use to analyze people's actions in the marketplace and applies them to people's actions in collective decision making. Economists who study behavior in the private marketplace assume that people are motivated mainly by self-interest. Although most people base some of their actions on their concern for others, the dominant motive in people's actions in the marketplace—whether they are employers, employees, or consumers—is a concern for themselves. Public choice economists make the same assumption—that although people acting in the political marketplace have some concern for others, their main motive, whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists, or bureaucrats, is self-interest. In Buchanan's words the theory "replaces... romantic and illusory... notions about the workings of governments [with]... notions that embody more skepticism."

While PC theorists used a series of reasonable arguments to explain why the machinery of government is also prone to failure, they included a hidden assumption: that corporations are private firms, and essentially natural effulsions of spontaneous will; and that they are locked in a combat for moral authority with a strictly adversarial state. In fact, most "private sector" enterprise, if not actually carried out by a large corporation, is at any rate controlled by one, and corporations are in fact "colonial appennages" of the state. They are chartered by the state and in large measure act as executors of the state; they are integrated into the machinery of government, chiefly through their massive reliance on the legal system; their quarrels with the state are no more implacable than quarrels between rival divisions of most businesses, or with other businesses; and they ultimately rely on the state to champion their interests in markets where they are established as the domestic employer.

However, this objection of mine is relevant only to the comparative moral judgments that PC theorists insist on making between the two; it's like debating whether it's his soul or his spirit that is responsible for Travis's vengeful daydreams. Also, the surmise that people are uninformed because accumulating information on one's polity is an unrewarding waste of time, whereas private usurpers of the public sphere are very well informed, is actually another error of logic, because it assumes the corporate lobbyist is "well-informed" in any normative sense. Actually, the lobbyist is an employee of an executive staff that is not necessarily any better informed than the union steward regarding the national interest. Otherwise, it may or may not apply to the people in government. It may fail to apply if the political class, including political science professors, journalists, members of congress, and lawyers harbor a sense of professional pride in their stewardship of the nation.

In the 1980's, a trend developed in which members of the political class who were not, at the moment, in political office, were hired as lobbyists or governors of firms. At the same time, the Usonian political class was replaced gradually by the managers I mentioned above; for the most part, this involved "foundations" created by the likes of Howard J Ahmanson, Jr, Richard Mellon Scaife, Robert Hurtt, and John M Olin, which systematically recruited students and funded think tanks. These organizations prepare position papers for trade associations, fact sheets for public officials, and "astroturf" call/fax campaigns for the enemy.

In this way, the politcal class came to be dominated by men who are of weak character, arrogant to the defeated, intellectually indifferent, and highly malleable. The actual initiative came from business interests, without regard to the consequences of getting their own way.

The pertinance of PC Theory jumps out at one when one reads further in the sympathetic explanation I quoted earlier:

Although public choice economists have focused mostly on analyzing government failure, they also have suggested ways to correct problems. For example, they argue that if government action is required, it should take place at the local level whenever possible. Because there are many local governments, and because people "vote with their feet," there is competition among local governments, as well as some experimentation. To streamline bureaucracies, Gordon Tullock and William Niskanen have recommended allowing several bureaus to supply the same service on the grounds that the resulting competition will improve efficiency.

Nor has the Katrina disaster embarrassed these professional stooges:

Media Transparency: Drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, suspend environmental regulations including the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, suspend prevailing wage labor laws, promote vouchers and school choice, repeal the estate tax and copiously fund faith-based organizations. These are just some of the recommendations a trio of hearty Heritage Foundation senior management officials are making to best facilitate the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast.

Just as the Iraq War has been a Petri Dish for the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, rebuilding the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could prove to be the mother of all testing grounds for a passel of active Heritage Foundation's domestic policy initiatives.

Washington, DC's most prestigious and influential right wing think tank has been rocking and rolling since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

RESOURCES: Talking Points Memo, as usual, is indispensible on this topic. Here's a run-down of useful posts:

• an extremely detailed timeline of the disaster
• 9/26/05: CBS says FEMA has rehired Brownie as a consultant 'to evaluate its response following Hurricane Katrina.'"
• 9/23/05: link to a story in the LA Times about the White House's decision to switch from housing vouchers for Katrina-displaced persons, to massive trailor parks.
• 9/23/05: If you look down into the explanation section, it notes that the savings are in millions, not billions, on this and the item below on cuts at the Department of Education. Yet, they push this transcription error through the whole document. So about half a trillion dollars worth of savings they claim doesn't even exist.
• 9/15/05: The president's first major initiatives were deep wage cuts for the people who will do the reconstruction.

Kathryn Cramer, of course, also has a Katrina file and a Rita file. I realize that Kathryn's given name is etymologically related to that of the deadliest US natural (sic) disaster in over a century, but her zeal to detail the consequences is truly awe-inspiring. One of the more disturbing of her entries has to do with a correspondent whose relatives—an 83-year old woman and her quadriplegic son—were found dead in their home. She has also documented exhaustively the flooding boundaries within New Orleans caused by Katrina.