t a l l a p e

Jacob Weisberg suggests in this Slate column that liberals, currently busy ranting about the prospect of the Gulf Coast becoming a laboratory for conservative social and economic policy, take a breather and let Bush and company have their way with New Orleans.

My initial reaction was that Weisberg was nuts. I have a bad feeling about vouchers, Opportunity Zones, and all the rest.

But he changed my mind, in just a couple of sentences. Specifically, these:

They [liberals] should hold back on their specific objections—some of which are valid, some of which are not—and let Bush have his way with the reconstruction. Making New Orleans a test site for conservative social policy ideas could shake out any number of ways politically. But all of us have a stake in an experiment that tells us whether conservative anti-poverty ideas, uh, work. If the conservative war on poverty succeeds, even in partial fashion, we will all be better for its success. And if it fails, we will have learned something important about how not to fight poverty.

I’m actually a little bit embarrassed that I needed someone to say this before I could see the truth in it.

We don’t know whether things like vouchers, tax abatements for companies that add jobs, and all the rest work. But we have an opportunity to try them and see. New Orleans has long demonstrated that 60′s-era social and economic development programs didn’t always work, and trying something else isn’t a bad thing. Even if it is, probably, going to somehow benefit Halliburton as well as the urban poor who move back to the city.