The Lesson of Hurricane Katrina

Two year ago, I posted on the real tragedy of Katrina:
The real tragedy of Katrina is that, after the media’s misreporting of the real situation for a week, the nation’s now believes that only more federal government can save us from hurricanes. In spreading this message, the media is actually killing people, not saving them. Now, if the media could only publicize the stories of self-reliance and personal initiative that actually saved people, they might undo this damage, but given that these stories do little to futher their political agenda of increasing their own power, I doubt it will happen.
However, the people are smarter than the media and certainly smarter than their politicians. It appears that those in hurricane zones did learn the real lesson of Katrina: that individuals must trust less in government and more in each other. Read the story from Reason Magazine. The money quote:
The commonly held notion that post-Katrina recovery effort has been hampered by a lack of leadership is true only if "leadership" refers only to political leadership. There, there's not only a lack of leadership, but a stifling bureaucracy that's smothering real progress. Across the Gulf Coast, there are real people taking real risks, trying to buck the obstacles thrown in their way, and many are seeing real results. Some are motivated by profit, others by love of their neighbors, or a sense of community. But they aren't posturing, or complaining, or speechifying. They're acting. We've heard a great deal about the leadership problem in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast over previous month. Make no mistake, there is one. But the problem is not that city hall, the state house, or the U.S. Congress aren't doing enough. It's that they're doing too much, and preventing the real leaders-the organic leaders springing up in community centers, school halls, and business districts-from making their own decisions, informed by their own, localized wisdom and experience, about how to rebuild.