Of Burma and Katrina

Rush: It is due to one simple fact, maybe not just one, but I think the central characteristic here of these massive humanitarian disasters is that when people are denied freedom, the results can be deadly. Millions of poor people in Burma live on a floodplain right along the coast, and the reason they do is because they have to raise enough rice to support their families. They have no freedom. They have no freedom to move around. They have no property rights or anything else. They have to live where they live right in the target of a floodplain, just to be able to eat.

Now, you can contrast this with the poor people in New Orleans, who did hear the warnings before Hurricane Katrina. At least they had the freedom to choose to stay or to leave, which helps illustrate the fact that we have the richest poor people in the world. They had every warning available to them, they all had televisions, most of them had cars, or they had ways of getting out. They had the freedom to choose whether to leave or stay.

That was not the case in Burma. So what we have here, folks, we have one more example of what can happen when people are denied freedom, freedom to own property and to benefit in proportions to one's own creativity and hard work, and a lot of people are going to blame this on global warming and climate change and all this, and all these poor people.