Leaving the victims behind

August 31, 2005

Yesterday, while the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was still coming to light, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto invited on an economic professor in Orlando named Jack Chambless to discuss aid to the Gulf Coast. Actually, to be more specific, the discussion was on whether the government should provide aid to the region at all. (Thanks for D.S. for the tip.)

Cavuto: Forget insurance. My next guest says not one taxpayer dollar should go toward rebuilding the city of New Orleans.

Joining us now is Jack Chambless. He is the economics professor of Valencia Community College in Orlando. Professor, why do you say that?

Chambless: Well, if we look at Article One, Section Eight of the United States Constitution — and I encourage all Americans to look at that before we start opening up our tax coffers to pay for all of this — we have every obligation to provide for New Orleans in terms of charity, private charity from one person to the other.

But the founding fathers never intended, Article One, section Eight of the Constitution, never intended to provide one dollar of taxpayer dollars to pay for any disaster or anything that we might call charity. What we now have is the law of unintended consequences taking place, where FEMA has come into New Orleans, a place where, ecologically, it makes no sense to have levees keeping the Mississippi River from flooding into New Orleans, like it naturally should.

Now with FEMA bailing out Louisiana, bailing out Florida and lowering the overall cost of living in these places, we have people with no incentive to leave. And the law of unintended consequences means that more people are dying with every one of these storms. They’re becoming more and more expensive, more and more property loss, just because the federal government has violated the Constitution to provide for these funds.

And on and on it went. Cavuto, the day after the hurricane hit and while flood waters rose, hosted a lengthy discussion on whether taxpayers should help these ravaged areas. Never once did Cavuto point out that this is insane. Instead, he responded to the professor’s arguments by saying, “It’s a good point,” and ultimately thanking Chambless for sharing “an argument we don’t hear often espoused.”

Insert joke about why Fox News hates America here.

Straight out of Herbert Spencer (who died in 1902). Can’t these guys come up with something just a wee bit more creative?

The “rugged individual” hero-of-capitalism that Spencer envisioned wasn’t a reality even back then (Carnegie didn’t make his money by his own manual labor after all). It’s as phony as Hobbes’ mythical “state of nature” peopled by isolated individuals, living lives which were “nasty, brutish and short” until they contrived a “social contract” through which they individually agreed to collective obligations.

There never was such a state. Logically, how did they come together to write a contract in the absence of a common language? and if they had that, then they learned it and weren’t isolated. Historically/biologically, we came from hominid beings which lived socially long before speech or declarations of rights or constitutions or Article I, section 8.

We need to help victims because we’re social. That’s it. The rest is silly academic nonsense which is at least as old as Socrates and not really worth addressing.

But since Chambless is busy claiming some magic for Article I, section 8 (detailing some Congressional power to tax and spend), he might add the final Clause 18 (“To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers”. Pretty open-ended imho. Open enough to permit us to act like decent human beings, something the GOP no longer sees the point of.

  • This guy is from Orlando. As in FL. As in the FL which got hit by 4 hurricanes last fall and got a bunch of FEMA money.

    Perhaps someone is scared there might be a call to curb tax cuts in order to deal with the costs of the disaster.

    Is Chambliss against Federal money to get the oil fields and refineries back up and running?

  • I saw this ass he is a little number cruncher with not idea of how the trickle out for this is so huge that can hardly be comprehended. Like charity would touch what was needed. He needs to take his head out of the ledgers and get a snif of the real world.

  • The guy has a masters degree, not a PhD, and is an ECONOMICS professor as opposed to a political science or history professor.

    Fox had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find this guy.

  • There’s a reason this guy’s at a place like Valencia Community College and not Harvard or even Arkansas State University. Poppy’s right–it took some doing to find this guy.

  • I can’t fathom what this guys sees as the plight of the people on the Gulf Coast not fitting into the “General Welfare” of the people which is right up there in the Preamble as to why we have a government in the first place.

  • Definitely scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Is he seriously suggesting that New Orleans simply be abandoned because it takes effort to keep the water out? If the Dutch felt that way, Holland would have disappeared long ago. I imagine he would also object to any federal money being spent on permanently relocating all the poor and elderly residents of the Big Easy who don’t have the means to leave even if they wanted to.

    If this guy is the best Karl can do at deflecting blame from the administration for withdrawing 71 million dollars in flood protection money last year, they’re going to be in a world of hurt as soon as the shock wears off and the anger sets in.

  • On the other hand, Dune Road in Westhampton, Long Island gets wiped out in every hurricane and then the army corps of engineers rebuilds it at great expense to the taxpayer.

    The houses on Dune Road are all upscale vacation homes for the wealthy who know when they buy those houses, chances are good the houses
    will get wiped out in the next storm.

    So should the taxpayer be obligated to rebuild Dune Road for the benefit of vacation home owners who can afford to buy elsewhere?

  • And I am quoteing Article 1, Section 8:

    “To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

    Neil Cavuto must have just skimmed that part.

  • I agree that Chambless needs a whack upside the head. I hope he tries to sell that policy in Florida too, next time the Feds help out there.

    But at some point it will stop making sense to rebuild places like the city of New Orleans. Whether we are there right now is an open question. When sea level rises several feet above them due to global warming, and insurance simply cannot be purchased, will it finally be time to call it quits?

    The same amount of money could be spent to build a much larger city on higher ground, which couldn’t be destroyed by the next cat 5 hurricane.

    Yes, rebuilding NOLA could be done. But unless money is unlimited, whenever you say yes to one idea, you say no to others.

    Maybe it’s time to admit that fighting mother nature doesn’t make sense in this case.

  • Hmmmm, maybe he has a point. Maybe building cities in places that are prone to diaster is a bad idea. I not sayinying people should not be helped – just that helpingh restore NO to it’s former self may not be such a good idea.

  • #12 is on the money here. We need to help people recover economically, but we don’t need to throw good money after bad. New Orleans is not a place that any sane developer would choose to build on unless they have a ton of cash to blow on an extravagant, and ultimately doomed, land reclamation project. Where’s that cash coming from? It ain’t the “free market”.

    My vote is to level the condemned sections and start over with the Venice model.

  • I don’t know what Constitution he’s reading from.
    My Article I, Section 8 says “The Congress shall
    have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts
    and excises [and income taxes through the 16th
    Amendment], to pay the debts and provide for
    the common defense and GENERAL WELFARE
    (emphasis mine) of the United States;” Then
    he says
    ” But the founding fathers never intended, Article One, section Eight of the Constitution, never intended to provide one dollar of taxpayer dollars to pay for any disaster or anything that we might call charity. ”

    So first he tells us to read Article I, Section 8, which appears
    to contradict him, and then he tells us the founders never
    meant it, but doesn’t tell us where to read that. Is it just
    late in the day, and I’m getting dense, or is this guy
    totally off the wall? And if the founders never meant it,
    why did they put it in Article I, Section 8?

  • As an economist, you would think that he would realize the economic implications of letting the 5th largest port in the world go it alone. I saw another blog entry that said that a huge amount of food is exported through New Orleans. It is not just the immediate vicitims that are impacted, but others along the conomic “food” chain.

  • We’re not just talking about rebuilding N.O. If that somehow happens, there will still be the ongoing, intense, expensive and sometimes fruitless battle to keep the Mississippi/Atchafalaya in their respective channels. They were born to wander and Katrina seems to be part of a trend rather than an exception.

    New Orleans has been a great city but it’s precariously placed existence has to be questioned. What to do though about the port itself? How about an offshore loading/unloading facility that just requires keeping the Mississippi dredged to allow traffic?

    Referring to another CB post, (A region is in ruins……), I don’t know what God was trying to say about abortion clinics with fetus shaped Katrina but she/he may have been making a point about building cities on mega-river deltas.

  • Definitely scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Is he seriously suggesting that New Orleans simply be abandoned because it takes effort to keep the water out? If the Dutch felt that way, Holland would have disappeared long ago. I

    Holland doesn’t have hurricanes. That’s for starters. The previous posters opining about not rebuilding N.O. make plenty of sense to me. If we spend the disaster money building a city near N.O. but on higher ground, that would be money much better spent. Because like it or not, this will happen again. And again. And again. It just doesn’t make sense, unless you could build levees that’d definitively keep out a Cat 5 hurricane. I doubt it can be done. This was just a Cat 4 when it hit, I believe, and look what happened. (And please don’t berate me for using “just” in that sentence. I lived through Hugo’s first landfall in Guadeloupe that set a world wind speed record, and would’ve been a Cat 7 if the scale went that high).

    I wish this disaster would wake up the people of this country to a realization that building should proceed logically. Rebuilding N.O. in the same place will be (and I say “will be” because you know damn well it’ll happen) foolish, asking for more death and destruction and cost in the future. Know what else is foolish? Building wood frame houses in hurricane zones, period. Hello! They blow down. I worked construction in Florida and could hardly believe that they allowed us to build houses out of cardboard and stucco and sheetrock over 2 x 4 framing. Absolutely stupid. Remember after Andrew hit? Trainloads of plywood were headed to Florida, instead of busloads of masonry workers to build houses that would withstand the next hurricanes. Didn’t these policymakers ever hear of the three little pigs?

    I went to college in Florida, and was involved in fighting Arvida and other big developers who were selling low coastal land and building developments in areas that will clearly be devastated when—not if—big hurricanes hit. They didn’t give a damn, there was money to be made. They should never have been allowed to do it. We’ve already been paying for their folly as some of those developments have already been blown away. More will be. And I’m sure many of them have just been rebuilt. The definition of insanity is: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

    So what to do? Stop granting building permits in Florida, or at least in coastal Florida, for stick houses. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to extend that to coastal areas all along the Gulf. It’d save a lot of trees, too. Don’t grant any more building permits on the site of New Orleans. Create a plan to abandon the area to the sea. Build a new city complete with new port facilities nearby, on higher ground next to the delta.

    Of course it’ll be a drag to lose the historical city. Of course people won’t want to move. Of course it’ll be expensive. But in the long run you’ll save lives and you’ll save money and you’ll alleviate misery. Call me a socialist, but isn’t that something like the job of government, to make decisions that’ll result in the greater common good?

  • via Billmon:

    When the Levee Breaks

    If the worst case for global climate change comes to pass, the environmental and economic losses will dwarf, many times over, the costs of Hurricane Katrina. They’ll also reduce into insignificance the price tag on the Kyoto Treaty — which itself may be too little, too late. If Shrub really thinks that doing something about climate change would “wreck the economy,” he should spend some of his unused vacation time thinking about what just happened to New Orleans.

    http://billmon.org/archives/002120.html

  • Has Cavuto completely lost his mind!? Maybe Mr. Compassion would like to trade places with those of us who have had to evacuate our homes and
    have lost everything. I am now one of the refugees created by this
    disaster and I take great exception to Cavuto-idiot’s remarks.
    Perhaps he needs a new motto on the screen behind him when he pontificates on the fate of others: “Better let them do it and decrease the surplus population.” (ie die). Or perhaps Neil should just change his name to Ebenezer. It would suit him much better. Then again, maybe he will be visited by three apparitions that might help him reconsider his attitude.

  • Bravo Prof Chambliss. A+ in economics and and A+ on the Constitution. He was spot on and the fact that a bunch of socialists who think they have a right to the wages of others don’t like, tough. Go to Norway.

  • Actually, Ed (poster #1), I’ve been thinking a lot about Hobbe’s State of Nature in light of this disaster. This is why: in college, I looked upon his mythical / hypothetical ‘state’ as being completely ridiculous, and therefore invalid as a premise for political doctrine. However, I came to realize that the ‘state of nature’ in question is one that often emerges out of a disaster of this caliber. War-torn cities, post-hurricane New Orleans, areas devastated by natural disasters have all demonstrated the capacity to take on the ‘nasty and brutish’ social construct that he illustrates. This ‘pre-political’ anarchic state is so often viewed as something that exists in historical sequence, i.e. occurring ‘before’ the rise of civilized states, not intermittently throughout history. I wonder if Hobbes (and/or Locke) was coming from a context of war-ravaged Europe and not actually attempting to describe a state of pre-history, as so many of us would believe, but one which he had actually witnessed. It is certainly the best explanation for the behaviors that have taken place in the wake of this disaster. This would be helpful to bear in mind the next time someone wants to make yet another racist crack.

    Fundamentally, ‘tear it down and build it elsewhere’ arguments, while ecologically and structurally salient, are pretty unrealistic, for various reasons. The feds and contractors will go in, scoop out, drain and, presumably shore up those levees piecemeal, while people gradually return to their lives. The city can’t possibly have been completely destroyed; and razing it entirely seems pretty wasteful. Looking at the pictures, I can’t imagine that mother nature exactly wants her back……..

  • However, I do fundamentally agree with absolutely everything President Lindsay states here. That is an incisive post.

  • Okay, so given the basis of his point (if it can legitimately be called that), our federal government would then turn a blind eye to communities all along the Misssissipi river that could flood due to rising waters, all areas where earthquakes could occur, all areas where tornados could occur, areas where avalanches occur, all areas where droughts could occur, all areas where blizzards could occur. Basically, there would be very few places in this country wherein people could live in accordance with this ideology. Given the occurance of this particular disaster, New Orleans simply cannot recover without the help of the federal government plus private assistance.

    Does this community college twerp think that everyone here (I am a New Orleans native) just decided, “Hey, let me live in a home below sea level. That should be an interesting scenario.”?

    No. Blame it on Bienville, if you must blame. The city was founded in 1699 for God’s sake! Our families migrated here from Ireland, South America, Greece, Germany, France — all over Europe. Most of us in New Orleans have all lived in this loving, tight knit community for many, many generations — spanning back to the mid 1800’s. New Orleans and the entire surrounding area is a very close community — and most have lived here our entire lives.

    We are not like much of the rest of the nation’s urban areas wherein people simply uproot them selves to follow that higher paying job, etc. Family and relationships are paramount in N.O. That’s why we’re here. The city has a life and soul of it’s own that people like this geek will never understand. This city is profoundly unlike pre-fab Orlando, Mr. Shameless, and that’s why we live where we do.

    Do not ever step foot in this town Jack Chambless. You will not be welcomed, and people will not forget your heartlessness and ability to kick an entire community when our worlds seem to be ending. And I guess if you have your way, no one would ever be able to step foot in this town again (unless of course we raised enough private funds to recover from this horrible natral disaster). There is NO WAY we can make it with out the government’s help here. This is not about insurance coverage or premiums. For you to think that, shows what a COMPLETE lame brain you are.

    You simply cannot imagine how unbelievably devasting this is to us, for SO many reasons. And you do not have the slightest inclination about the far reaching consequences of this, economic and otherwise. Do you know how many jobs have been completely wiped out? You are an economics professor (at a community college) — do you know what it means to CLOSE an ENTIRE CITY and it’s surrounding areas for weeks? No — but no one ever did before, because nothing of this magnatude has ever occured in this country before. But we are living it.

    But this is not just about economics — it’s about people’s lives, our families, our schools and communities, and most of all our CULTURE. This culture that I am referring to is something that most of our nation lives without. So if you’ve never had it, maybe it can be hard for you to understand why it’s so important. But it is something that people from New Olreans understand greatly — and we cannot live without it.

    And by the way — we have always heard of the risks of a storm like Katrina… but it was so hard to absorb that it would really happen. Why? Because the city has been here for over two hundred years and it never happened before. Nothing remotely near to this.

    And that’s what congress thought too, when some economics guru/team did a cost benefit analysis deciding to fund a levee system that would protect New Orleans, one of the oldest cities in the country, from a category three hurricane instead of a category four or five. Let’s hope that economics analyst will now loose his job — certainly don’ t need the federal coffers paying for that kind of recommendation in the future. Who knows, maybe he’ll become a professor at a community college.

    Jack Chambless has added much hurt to people already suffering so greatly in this area with his callous, inaccurate comments (refer to post #15 above). So I am up at 4 a.m. in the morning, responding to this jerk’s innacurate comments, but more so, to his cruelty — when I should be getting rest for the my family’s move to Atlanta tomorrow. We will be leaving a relative’s house in Baton Rouge which has contained 18 to 20 evacuated family members over the last week and half. Our worlds have crumbled a little bit more each day. I don’t want to live in Atlanta — it lacks all of the things that I love so dearly about New Orleans. Yet at 4:00 in the morning I feel compelled to post here. Because perhaps the most frightening part of Chambless’ comments, beyond his stunted thinking, are his lack of compassion and caring. That is something that we here in New Orleans find very hard to understand.

    Jack Chambless, you do not deserve to live in the United States of America. Thank God our country is not comprised of more people like you. If it were, that would be a reason to consider living elsewhere.

  • Wow. Tear-inducing words. Excuse me for earlier, if my uber-pontificating comments seemed callous or inappropriate.

    I had earlier posted that N.O. was merely 278, missing the mark by 24 years or so…this speaks to the insanely rich history of a city which predates our constitution, to say nothing of major revolutionary/historical events of 18th C history that I’m much too lazy to look up….

    Your sentiments about Jack Chambl-Ass and all the other senseless bloviaters is felt by many. Unfortunately, there were so many could do so little in the wake of Katrina; hopefully now sending money and offering homes may forge a dent……..let’s hope the recovery is swift.

    Who can properly pay homage to the dead or surviving?………

  • Being a former student from professor Jack Chambles, has opened my eyes to see what government is really about. Governemnt don’t help the people, they tell us how we should manage our money. Therefore, the governemnt will get more involved in our personal life, and soon will be making all the decesions for us. “The Control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself” (Hayek 97).

    The government should just leave the people alone, stop being in our lives, and let private companies and enterprises be in places like FEMA and the FDA etc..

  • That is an accurate statement concerning the government controlling to much of the economy. The government is a monopoly in a way because it has no competition. What incentive is there to reform after some blunder of theirs .. Its not like they are gonna go out of “buisness”. One guy might not re-elected.. Big deal, that dosent mean the same mistake cannon happen.

    Jack Chambless is correct in his views that the capatlist should be responsible for fixing any damages. At least they will be relaible to provide better support because they work pro-gain. Unline the government who can get away with almost anything, dosent even have to try hard and just shift the blame on their vitually endless row of officals and beurcratic place holders.

    New Orleans shouldnt be rebuild using tax dollars. FEMA is modern day Robin Hood.

  • ……tax money should be spent on fixing the messes of less productive society? yeah right!
    fuck you…fucking communists.
    my parents worked in government-run work camps that were run by the communist government of cambodia. and well…they came here to this great country…and without help from the government…we became successful.

    we chose a good place to live. we worked hard to achieve financial success.
    my parents were sponsored to come here based on the GENEROSITY OF OTHERS…meaning charity…not government plunder.
    government destroys all that it touches…you all should know that by now.

    boo hoo hoo…a bunch of stupid people that didnt want to evacuate died…baw baw baw…they died on their own decision to stay there.
    let’s give money to the poor so they can become dependent on government welfare…
    fuck that shit….in the REAL WORLD…you work…or you starve..and then eventually die

    yes i know that i am commenting very late…but i hope to make a difference on the readers that may stumble into this. i want to enlighten that america is a great country that shouldn’t be moving towards socialism…[which will turn into communism]

    private enterprise makes everything more productive and efficient. there is no more to be said here

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