This column is a real zinger, especially on the remarkable wastefulness of New Orleans. Its Levee Board has been blowing money on all sorts of things other than maintaining and strengthening the levees. Murdock also details lots of federal government waste as well.
Which gets me back to thinking about the Kelo case. One of the primary justifications for the confiscation of property there (and in most other eminent domain cases these days) is that the tax base will grow if land is transferred from a homeowner to a big commercial concern. Okay, but then what? Why presume that higher tax revenues are a benefit to the populace at large? The New Orleans experience is that politicians find innumerable ways to blow additional revenues without doing anything beneficial for the populace. The Big Easy may be notoriously corrupt, but it’s not all that much cleaner than other cities.
