Will Wilkinson is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington and runs the smart Fly Bottle blog. In this TCS Central piece piece (blog link here), Mr. Wilkinson deliciously exposes the muddled thinking behind three recent op-eds written by NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman that all contend that the principles of limited government and economic libertarianism caused the tragedy in New Orleans.
When I read Ms. Dowd’s piece earlier in the week, it occurred to me that her remark “when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens” rather naively presumed that less limited but competent government is a realistic alternative. However, Mr. Wilkinson’s op-ed takes that observation several steps further and concludes:

Dowd, Krugman, and Meyerson evidently loathe free markets and limited government. And they also loathe the Bush administration. Apparently it would be nice for them if they could bundle their hatreds into a package of loathing, tie it up in spite, and burn it. So they try. But the package won’t hold together, and they can’t bash Bush without burning themselves. The most cursory inspection of the front page indicates that the difference between him and them is simply the details of their hostility to economic freedom and small government.

Read the entire piece for some refreshing clear thinking.

Following on this post from earlier in the week regarding the economic impact to Houston of the arrival of thousands of former New Orleans residents, Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution provides his typically insightful analysis on the issue. Tyler notes that there are economic benefits and costs attributable to the arrival of the former New Orleans residents, and concludes:

Both the costs and benefits of resettlement will be overstated by partisans. The Houston boom won’t last long, and the costs will net out to put the city in a roughly break-even position.

My sense is that Tyler’s view is largely correct because most of New Orleans’ larger businesses that could provide a big employment boost for Houston (i.e., the port, refineries, etc.) will remain in New Orleans due to the huge capital investments there. The one difference with the exodus from New Orleans from other analogous circumstances is the decimation in New Orleans of small businesses, which were the largest employer in the area. The jobs with the big employers will return to New Orleans relatively quickly, but the replenishment of the supply of jobs attributable to small businesses — particularly small service companies — will take much longer because a huge number of those businesses were wiped out by the storm and do not have the capital or demand necessary to re-start their business in the New Orleans area any time soon. Whether any significant number of those jobs are ultimately re-created in the Houston economy remains to be seen.
On a related economic note, the Chronicle’s business columnist, Loren Steffy, has a good column in which he notes the prejudicial impact that the Bankruptcy Amendments of 2005 will have on many people who have been rendered insolvent as a result of Hurricane Katrina, not the least of which is the fact that such amendments increase the cost considerably of filing an individual bankruptcy case.