Current Affairs

More reasonable comments on Katrina, including thoughts on "refugees," "the homeless," partisanship and the remarkable Brendan Loy, who turns out to have been smarter than all the pundits and politicians combined.

People are trying to fathom the Katrina aftermath in terms a little more sophisticated than political blame. The experinece of Galveston and Charleston might offer some insight. Some argue that one part of New Oeleans will come back -- the tourism mecca -- but not the commercial center.

So much attention has been focused on New Orleans that Katrina's devastation in Alabama and Mississippi hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves. The newspaper in Biloxi is owned by Knight Ridder, the same company responsible for my News-Sentinel paychecks. We've been told that Knight Ridder will match all employee contributions, up to a $500,000 total, with everything raised going to help the newspaper's employees.

So, you want to go live where you will be the safest, at least as far as nature's wrath is concerned -- the one place where you would be least likely to suffer a hurricane, tornado, blizzard, flood, killing frost that makes you run around calling "Wildfire." But the tradeoff is that you have to live in the most boring place in the world, right? Not exactly.

I hope Indiana officials don't get too worked up over price gouging on gasoline. The law of supply and demand can be flouted once in a while, but it can't be ignored in the long run, and market forces are better at sorting out what needs to be sorted out than anything the government can come up with. Since we're on the subject, I've never much understood the outrage over scalping, either.

I guess I must look for complicated reasons for simple problems. I had presumed the lack of a brilliant performance in getting aid to the Gulf Coast might have been a combination of, 1) the fact that it was the biggest natural disaster to ever hit the United States in modern times and, 2) mistakes made by lots of people at all levels of government. Silly me.

It's not quite true that, while the U.S. rushes with aid whenever disaster strikes somewhere else in the world, the rest of the world is indifferent to our disasters. Hurricane Katrina has gotten the world's attention. On the other hand, we might have been just a little slow to get it here in this country.

Off course, you don't have to read about this on a blog or in a newspaper or see it on TV; all you have to do is pull up at the pump in Fort Wayne. At least it means we won't have to keep reading the lectures of the adjust-it-for-inflation know-it-alls. Gasoline was -- gasp! -- $3.03 in 1981 in today's dollars? Those lucky guzzlers.

For the fifth year in a row, the United Nations has ranked Norway the world's best nation in which to live. But the country ranks 29th on the Index of Economic Freedom. The United States, on the other hand, ranks eighth on the best-place list and 12th on the economic-freedom index. People will take various lessons from that.

Suppose Sen. Lugar will come back with lots of ideas about improving airport security?