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The Deadly Legacy of the Welfare State Lies in New Orleans
Among the most tragic scenes in the Hurricane Katrina disaster was that of the thousands of poor people – almost all of whom were African Americans – who were stranded at the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center, desperately waiting for the federal government to come and save them.

Why were they stuck there when thousands of others had already left the city? Because they were too poor to save themselves from death and disaster. They lacked the money to drive out of town and get a motel room for a few days before the hurricane struck.

Leftists are now saying that the New Orleans disaster shows that federal-government assistance to the poor and needy is more necessary than ever.

What in the world could leftists be thinking? It is leftist economic ideology – reinforced unfortunately by modern-day conservative “reform” philosophy – that is responsible for the horrible economic plight in which the New Orleans poor find themselves.

After all, don’t forget: The economic situation in New Orleans comes 70 years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt converted the federal government into a welfare provider for the poor and needy. Under FDR, the primary purpose of the federal government became to relieve poverty through the coercive confiscation of wealth from “the rich” in order to redistribute the money to “the poor.” This was the era in which Americans witnessed the advent of Social Security, a bankrupt tax-and-transfer program that ultimately became the crown jewel of the socialistic welfare state.

Thirty years after the New Deal came Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, in which Johnson declared “war on poverty” all across America. Here we saw the advent of Medicare and Medicaid along with hundreds of other federal programs whose supposed aim was to abolish poverty, once and for all.

Decade after decade, the federal government became a massively growing tax-and-spend engine that sucked trillions of dollars of income and savings out of the pockets of the American people in order to fund ever-growing federal programs to “help the poor.”

And now New Orleans. Here in its spectacular glory is the magnificent result of 70 years of the welfare state – of the federal “war on poverty.” Tens of thousands of people lacking sufficient money to enable them to escape oncoming disaster for just a few days – dependent on the federal government for their salvation – desperately waiting for federal officials to deliver food and water to them – and to pick them up and deliver them to government-run refugee centers around the nation.

In other words, the 70-year-old New Deal–Great Society “war on poverty” has left tens of thousands of people destitute (or dead) in New Orleans and looking to the federal government for their salvation.

Yet, according to leftist commentators, this just confirms that we need to wage the federal “war on poverty” more fiercely than ever before.

What deadly and destructive leftist nonsense! ...