I ran across this site while researching free markets and just couldn’t wait to read it. It seems that it was not corruption or bad engineering which broke the levees in New Orleans. It was the free market. People didn’t die because they relied on the ever fallible government. They died because of free markets.

[City Officials] announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.

Holy Cow! Not only is New Orleans a free market, but so are some or all Third-World countries. Either I have been sleeping for a very long time or the author has a very different definition of free markets. I am from Harahan, a suburb of New Orleans and I distinctly recall that that Louisiana is still part of the United States.

No city within United States borders can be a free market. Not even Indian Reservations. Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution gives powers to Congress which no libertarian would ever give a government. Just the power to build Post Roads has allowed the united States Congress to subsidize shipping, railroads, and roads, even though such acts are Constitutionally prohibited.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. Thus does the invisible hand work its wonders in mysterious ways.

Well, that sounds right. It seems as if Mr. Parenti has a good grasp on the benefits and the definition of free markets. Perhaps there are other clues in the article as to why he would assume New Orleans was a free market.

Many of these people were low-income African Americans, … They are poor not because they’re lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.

Wait a minute. There are no taxes in a libertarian free market.

In addition, the president cut $30 million in flood control appropriations.

In a free market society, government doesn’t have money to appropriate. How could New Orleans be a free market and get subsidized by the federal government?

In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market would take care of things.

Oh my! According to the author, New Orleans is a very strange free market in deed. In this free market private property owners are not allowed to dispose of their property without first obtaining permission from their government. Very strange.

And where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done with the $33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005?

Wow! This free market paradise has a Homeland Security Department with a $33 billion budget. What an odd free market New Orleans has.

But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some years now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the Gulf coast.

In a libertarian free market other private property owners would be suing the pants, shirt, shoes, and underwear off any private property owner which deliberately injured their private property. There would be so many injunctions stopping wetland draining and development that no insurer or financier would touch wetland developers.

As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like to say that relief to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private charity.

In a free market society, government has very little money, almost no resources and no mechanism to collect either. Why would any sane person rely on people with very limited resources over people with ever expanding resources? It doesn’t really make a lot of sense, does it? Almost all arguments against freedom don’t really make much sense.

Mr. Parenti has confused White House political policy with Free Markets. This is not all that surprising. Most people who argue against freedom are usually arguing against mistaken perceptions of what freedom is. This was true of slavery and of women voting and owning property. The world is always better off when people become more free and the people who do not read history will vainly argue against freedom until the cows come home. Luckily for us, history shows that they will eventually lose and the world will be a better place.