Spending, Part Deux

Hey, the WSJ agrees with me, the Lord of Truth!

This is from Friday's, op-ed piece by Daniel Henninger on OpinionJournal.com. It's called "All the King's Horses Cannot Save New Orleans."

Hope some other people realize this soon.

So we are sending all the king's horses and all the king's men to fix the Humpty-Dumpty of New Orleans. Put it back together on a sinking wall of mud and see if it falls off again.

President Bush has proposed a Gulf Opportunity Zone, which will test the novel idea of whether market forces can function while some $200 billion of public money is coursing through Louisiana. Louisiana political culture has run that drill for about 60
years; the result was New Orleans, before the storm. Congress's idea of giving
back is to open the spending levees. A short list of the federal bureaucracies on the case include FEMA, DHS, EPA, HHS, SBA, HUD, plus their partners in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Will this revive New Orleans? Should it? The residents of Detroit or Camden, N.J., might reasonably ask: What about us? Our neighborhoods look like they were hit by a hurricane? How about new houses for us?
The answer to whether we--America--should rebuild New Orleans is not
obviously and simply yes. We have a precedent. The answer to whether the World
Trade Towers should be "rebuilt" in some fashion was also obviously and
overwhelmingly yes. Four years on, nothing has been rebuilt largely because there is no evident market need for 10 million square feet of commercial space in lower Manhattan, and also because New York's politics is a distant relative of Louisiana's.

New Orleans, however, is not Podunk. Like the Twin Towers, New Orleans makes a special claim on the spiritual and historic life of the nation; or at least that claim has been made the past week in paeans to the place by every famous writer and celebrity who long ago moved away.

So what should New Orleans now become? It could resume life as what it was, a
tourist venue, but the cruel truth is that New Orleans isn't Rome, a place with no economic reason for being beyond tourism, which for Rome is enough. Lacking Bernini and Caravaggio among its ghosts, New Orleans probably needs more than a
storied past.

When thinking about what to do, I turn to Sir Peter Hall, the British historian of urban centers whose 1998 magnum opus, "Cities in Civilization," explained what allowed some cities to rise to excellence--from Athens to, believe it or not, Memphis, which he called "the soul of the Delta." Several years ago, Sir Peter delivered a lecture in Glasgow called "Creative Cities and Economic Development." If New Orleans' next incarnation is to become anything other than a fancy future slum, its new city fathers (and they'd better be new) should lend him an ear. What, Peter Hall asked, enabled the rise of six famously potent centers of urban creativity--Athens, Florence, London, Vienna, Paris, Berlin? They "were all capitalist cities," he answered, and "they were all great trading cities." New Orleans, site of a famous port, could be both, but isn't.

Those cities, Mr. Hall said, became "magnets for the immigration of talent" but were also "generators of the wealth that could help employ that talent." Indeed, "most creative cities were bourgeois cities." Absent market incentives vastly greater than those Mr. Bush has proposed, it is unlikely that New Orleans can begin to start the engines of wealth needed to become even a minor-league winner, which would be enough. But most intriguingly for New Orleans' edgy reputation, Sir Peter also argues that "creative cities . . . are places of great social and intellectual turbulence; not comfortable places at all," a place "where outsiders can enter and feel a certain state of ambiguity." Then comes this proviso: Greatness can never be achieved "in societies in which all sense of order has disappeared." (My emphasis.)

What is New Orleans today? It is the impoverished, lawless product of Huey Long's anti-capitalist populism, cross-fertilized with every poverty program Washington produced the past 60 years. The currently popular notion that "the country" somehow failed to notice that much of New Orleans had become a social and economic basket case is false. Every college student knows the basic storyline of "All the King's Men" if not that of former Governor Edwin Edwards (1992-96), now serving 10 years for extorting businessmen. Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a native of Louisiana, believes a "culture of fatalism" about corruption exists that makes the possibility of reform hard. "Corruption isn't quite normal in most places," he says, "but none of that's true in Louisiana."

Like other fans of the state and its famous city, he sees the period ahead as
Louisiana's last best chance for joining the rest of the rising New South economy. With characteristic mischievousness, Mr. Smith also notes that it is an open question whether Louisiana would meet the economic freedom and just-rule criteria of President Bush's Millennium Challenge grants for developing countries.

There is no hope for New Orleans unless what comes next is the opposite of the status quo before Katrina. It has happened elsewhere; Dublin, once moribund, is thriving. The man who on Sunday almost surely will be elected president of Poland, Donald Tusk, says, "Deregulation is our obsession." He says his country "is saturated with nit-picking" laws. Who will be Louisiana's Donald Tusk?

New Orleans needs an exemption from the politics and policies of the past 40 years. In a disaster equal to the hurricane's devastation of New Orleans, the federal welfare system eroded the life of the city's poorest families at the same time the schools were failing to educate them. Why should the poorest people of New Orleans have to return to their catastrophic schools? Where is the morality in a system that would do that?

The great creative cities Peter Hall described were exposed to the forces of the market in ways unthinkable today, giving them what he calls "unstable tension." But those market forces, linked to the dynamic urban centers across the South, may be the only force strong enough to stand against the political and cultural forces that almost certainly will cause New Orleans to fall again.