Monday, November 7, 2011

Why FEMA Failed in Its Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts

If FEMA didn't exist, after Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of different charitable organizations would have rushed to New Orleans. They would have all approached the relief operations differently and would have adapted to the conditions on the ground.

But because the rescue operation was all "co-ordinated" by FEMA, instead of creative solutions developing and being used by all kinds of organizations, the bureaucracy took over and FEMA, the disaster, followed Hurricane Katrina, the disaster.

Central planning never works. It is especially a fast moving failure, when conditions are changing rapidly. That's why FEMA failed and that's why the bureaucratic centrally-co-ordinated military has a difficult time defeating a bunch of rag-tag Taliban, who live in the caves of Afghanistan. The Taliban are quick to adapt to conditions, the centrally planned military do not.

Socialism is the ultimate centrally planned economic structure and will always fail for the same reasons FEMA did, but the failures of socialism will be much bigger crashes and cause much suffering along the way.

Be sure to listen to my most recent Robert Wenzel Show, where I discuss the differences between freedom and socialism.

3 comments:

  1. An even more important point- if the Army CoE hadn't neglected the levees for so long, and they had been in private hands, NoLa would never have flooded in the first place.

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  2. I've read some shite in my time but by, that's up there.

    What a load of bollocks.

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  3. The prime reason that the US military (like the Russian military before it) cannot defeat a bunch of guys running around in flip-flops and outdated small arms is that the Afghanis utilize guerilla warfare tactics which are entirely decentralized. Anybody familiar with warfare tactics knows that having central planning of the operations is extremely inefficient and often results in mass-casualties. Decentralization of warfare decisions has always been far more successful platform and reduces casualties for those engage in decentralized warfare. The only thing that hampers these tactics is usually shear numbers and technological capabilities of organized military forces. However, it is these same attributes of organized military tactics that often lead to the problems associated with costs and debt, thereby forcing the stronger, more organized forces to admit defeat financially.

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