How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

A must read for today - Michael Parenti: How the Free Market Killed New Orleans!

This:

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced warning that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

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

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. This is the way the invisible hand works its wonders.
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...is just the snarky beginning. Read the rest! It's serious.

The only point to add: Parenti is using the phrase Free Market in a conservative, libertarian sense: a dog-eat-dog, might-makes-right world with no rules, that inevitably results in anarchy. A disaster just makes this fact more visible. This is not the way Liberals/Progressives understand this phrase.