Extending my blog post from yesterday about the utter destruction of Venezuela by socialism, another thing that keeps jumping out at me is how comprehensively their nation has been ruined.
I was in N'awlins a year after Katrina there were still a lot of places boarded up. That was in a functioning nation that was doing its best to rebuild the place. What would it have looked like if everywhere in America had been Katrinaed?
Now pile on that the emigration of 10% of the population. That would be the 10% with foresight and skills, in case you were wondering.
Socialism hasn't just wiped out what they had, it wiped out their skill base to rebuild.
Part of the problem in New Orleans is New Orleans. Similar issues are everywhere, but they are kind of famous for, uh, creative priorities in building and maintenance.
ReplyDeleteBiloxi and Gulfport in Mississippi were hit harder, and recovered faster.
An interesting tidbit I ran into...a lot of people didn't go back to New Orleans, and they tended to come in two flavors: the ones who went to jail, or worse, for crimes that they had been getting away with for their whole lives (the first-hand I heard of was aggressive panhandling that strong-arm robbery with a "poor me" act, that guy was shot and his family was horrified that someone would do such a thing rather than accept a beating and robbery) and the folks who were forced to leave...and discovered that, outside of the crab-pot, they were actually pretty good. They weren't failures, and the world didn't hate them.