At Qualcomm stadium the line for volunteers who had come to offer help, was often longer than the line of refugees who had come to request help. At one point, the relief workers were forced to tell people, that no more food and water donations were needed.

I don’t remember that happening after Katrina. I remember people, many of whom had been warned to evacuate and didn’t, lashing out at the world for not helping them sooner. I was a talk show host at the time; we suspended normal programming for days to focus on raising money for the people of New Orleans. The frequent and angry denunciations of supposed American greed and racism didn’t make my job any easier.

Critics of entrepreneurial capitalism have long maintained that markets are a destroyer of social capital. Yes, they say, free-markets deliver high standards of living, but their gales of creative destruction unravel the social fabric. This has not been my experience. I used to run a non-profit agency serving at-risk children in certain low-income neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. There was very little capitalism occurring there (excluding drugs and prostitution, of course), but there was even less social capital. We had a tough time trying to keep a database of kids that we were helping, because the addresses were in a constant state of flux. The last names offered no real clue as to who was whom. The phone numbers changed continually, and they were almost never answered. Answering machines were rare – appointments were unheard of. Basically we learned through long experience that it was impossible to contact the parents (or guardians, or aunts, or whatevers) of the children we were trying to help. We just had to open the doors every evening and turn on the lights and see who came. I wonder if a reverse 911 evacuation call like the one that went out to a million San Diegans would have even worked in New Orleans.

I’m already bracing myself for the hate mail. “YOU’RE BLAMING THE VICTIMS!” they will blare. But I’m not blaming them, I’m trying to help them. Poverty stinks to begin with, but it’s even worse when a hurricane or an earthquake attacks. If I told you that today you were going to be hit with a natural disaster, but that you got the pick the city where your family would be when it hit, would you pick a rich one or a poor one? Would you pick one with honest and efficient road construction agencies or patronage ridden ones? Would you pick a town where almost everyone had Blackberries and cell-phones or where almost no one did? Would you pick a town were most people were business owners or where most of them were on welfare?

If you picked the former option in any of the choices above, then you have already implicitly agreed to my premise. Top-down central planning makes people less self-reliant and makes communities less resilient. I’m just asking you to make the same decision for them that you would make for yourself.