Our Mixed Economy Redux

Not too long ago, I discussed how the general consensus of the body politic can affect the psychoepistemology of our lawmakers. I made the following two observations at different points.

[Cause:] A republic whose citizenry does not regard the protection of its inalienable rights as the purpose of its government is doomed to get a government that violates those rights in some way.

[Effect:] Instead [of treating the rights of their constituents as their highest priority, and] knowing that their voters accepted the premise that somebody should be taxed for disaster relief, our government officials were concerned with striking some murky compromise between being not sacrificing enough for the refugees and sacrificing too much.

On Saturday, the front page of the Houston Chronicle featured a report detailing the aftermath of the various murky compromises of countless public officials. It was headlined above the fold thus: N.O. GANG WARS SPILL INTO AREA. Next to the headline were a map of Houston showing the locations of nine fatal shootings related to the gang activity of Katrina refugees. Its caption notes that authorities have apprehended eight suspects and are looking for three more. The three are pictured.

There are several things about the story I wish to discuss, but before I do so, I want to review another point I have made, the one I feared would come home to roost the day the buses crammed with refugees began heading to Houston amid reports of violence in New Orleans.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll again repeat just what it was that moved our officialdom down here to set a pack of wolves loose on the general public without at least the small courtesy of a warning.

People's lives were in danger and no one would warn us (publicly anyway). So do the alleged sensibilities of a minority group supercede the safety of a city's citizens (about a third of whom belong to that same minority)?

We were not warned. Why?

It would be little exaggeration to say that our nation's state religion is multiculturalism, and that our public officials, far from being free of its grip, are offering us citizens up as sacrifices to its deities.

Let's take a brief look at the real-world consequences of the ivory tower theories that are gagging our public officials and, at least in Louisiana, were setting criminals free.

We'll start by becoming a little bit better acquainted with a few of the helpless evacuees we welcomed to Houston after Katrina hit.

Citing a wave of violence rooted in turf battles back in New Orleans, Houston police on Friday identified 11 Hurricane Katrina evacuees as suspects in a string of homicides, robberies and kidnappings since November.

Eight of those men are already in custody. One of the three still at large is Ivroy Harris, 20, who goes by the nickname "B-Stupid" and was charged in the slaying of a man during a child's birthday party in New Orleans last May. [Why wasn't he in jail, then? -- ed] At 16, Harris also was wanted in connection with a shooting outside a public housing complex after several people opened fire and one man was killed, according to a published report. [He's a repeat offender to boot?!?!?! --ed]

Also wanted is Travis Jordan, 21, who in 2003 was seen picking up a 9 mm pistol after a man was shot while watching a Mardi Gras parade. The outcome of the earlier cases against Harris and Jordan could not be determined Friday. [How do we know about all these details, and yet not the outcomes of these serious cases? --ed]

Good thing Chief Hurtt et al. didn't fan the flames of racism in September by ratting out criminals like these who, as they used to say back in the sixties and seventies, "just happen to be black".

Not all the news is bad, though. For example, I noted previously that while multiculturalism holds enough sway to make our officials reluctant to say that the refugees might pose a problem, it did not keep then from discussing such problems among themselves privately. Furthermore, our criminal justice system is not, thank goodness, as hobbled as the one in New Orleans apparently is.

HPD homicide Capt. Dale Brown noted that many of those charged have extensive criminal records in New Orleans and that some had been jailed but were out on bail.

"We're going to hold them to the justice of Texas law," Brown said. "We think they are going to find things are a little bit different than in Louisiana. We're very aggressive in enforcing our laws in Texas. We're going to take care of our business."

That would be me you hear in the "Amen corner". This is what I had hoped would be the response of Texas law enforcement way back when I titled a post "Next Stop: Jail?" It is also something that City Journal writer Nicole Gelinas anticipated when she issued this warning for New Orleans.

[O]fficials in Louisiana and in New Orleans should view the increased crime woes of its western neighbor as a warning. As Louisiana begins to spend the $6 billon in federal grants for New Orleans's reconstruction, it should earmark some of that money toward building a top-notch justice system -- or the Big Easy's displaced criminals will surely return home in droves from less hospitable climes.

If, that is, these miscreants escape from jail or survive at all after getting convicted for murder in Harris County, which our liberal newspaper calls "a pipeline to death row", and which has alone convicted more than a quarter of the 242 inmates Texas has executed since the death penalty was reinstated over 20 years ago.

It is interesting to note the different reactions that have occurred at the different levels of officialdom. Unsurprisingly, law enforcement officials are most in tune, overall, with the proper purpose of a government. But even among police officers, there are distinctions. I have already noted that Chief Hurtt, who holds the most "political" position in the force, mouths multicultural pieties far too much while Captain Brown sounds like a real police officer.

Ayn Rand often commented that a big difference between America and Europe was that in America, there is a significantly bigger gap between the beliefs espoused by the leftist intellectual elite and those of the man in the street than in Europe. I would add that among our political officials, those from the rank and file of the police force are much closer to the man in the street, and so are more prone to take individual rights seriously, at least on a non-intellectual, "gut" basis. Unfortunately, elected officials, who must pass muster, at least to a degree, with the liberal media, are more prone to not take individual rights seriously.

These "gaps" (people vs. intellectuals and politicians vs intellectuals) also vary from one part of the country to another. This difference between New Orleans and Houston shows up on a national county-by-county map of the results of the 2004 presidential election. Orleans Parish went for Kerry whereas Harris County went for Bush, indicating that a least on a gross level, Houstonians are farther apart from the leftist elite than New Orleanians. At the level of officialdom, a reading between the lines of the first paragraphs of the story from the Houston Chronicle would indicate to me very lax courts and demoralized or corrupt police prevail in New Orleans. This does not seem to be the case in Houston.

We are lucky here in Texas that, even if some public officials will loose wolves upon us, at least others are here to clean up after them.

-- CAV