When we urged the rebuilding of New Orleans, we didn't mean this! A hideous plan to pour 250 billion dollars of Federal tax money – over $50,000 per citizen of Louisiana – down a bottomless pit. We were urging a spontaneous act of defiance of nature and an affirmation of human creativity. This would be the opposite: an orgy of misappropriation and misuse of the creativity of others.
Update: Here are some remarkable phenomena under way in Biloxi, Mississippi, driven by the free market and human creativity. Opportunities are being exploited and structural changes in land use are under way, such as poor people moving away from waterfront areas and rich people replacing them. There are, no doubt, many reasons for the sharp increase in many property prices since the hurricane, and not all of them are good. But many are, and overall the picture seems to be that those in the best position to know believe that the city will not only recover, but be considerably more valuable in the future than it was in the past.
