Why New Orleans was a disaster.

Seventy-five percent of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects.

Early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails -- so they just let many of them loose. (I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department.)

There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations -- that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

'Pack of wolves'

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit. But they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals -- and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness.

The welfare wards were a mass of sheep -- on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters -- not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

"Hurricane Katrina exposed the man-made disaster of the welfare state." By Robert Tracinski, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 9/11/05 (emphasis added).