More Private Response to Disasters - US Airways 1549

I join with others in celebrating the heroism of Captain Chesley Sullenberger and the flight crew of USAirways 1549 (don't forget the flight attendants folks!) for getting that plane down and getting everyone out alive.  I also would like to note the heroism of the first responders to the crash, as reported by the Washington Post:

Before police and Coast Guard vessels could respond, the Hudson's commercial flotilla converged on the scene. Ferry, tour boat and tugboat crews tossed life vests to the stranded passengers and began hoisting them up ladders.

People too often associate "commerce" with selfishness and narrow profit motives.  Stories like this are good reminders of the bourgeois virtues.  All of those people risked their lives and property because they had the right equipment and human capital to know what to do and how to do it.  They didn't charge anyone anything, they just did the right thing.  When skeptics of the ability of non-governmental institutions to respond to situations where there's no profit on the line raise their concerns, this is a good case to point to in response.

In many ways, the response of those private ships was but a smaller scale version of the response of Wal-Mart and other private sector actors to Hurricane Katrina, as I have documented elsewhere.  Just as Wal-Mart always has disaster relief supplies either on hand or close by, so can the commercial boats along the Hudson be quickly "repurposed" for disaster rescue if need be.  Viewing private sector capital that way should reduce the need to rely on the public sector to provide human and physical capital in the face of a disaster.

As I understand it, the folks along the NY Harbor engage in a number of disaster preparedness drills that, I believe, include the private sector.  In my work on Katrina, I have argued that local governments in hurricane-prone areas should be doing much more to allow the private sector to do what it does best in the preparation and response to disasters.  The lessons from yesterday's crash make it clear that private actors will indeed do the right thing and that governments should do all they can to facilitate their quick and effective response.

So a big thank you to all of those commercial mariners who, like Wal-Mart's associates, made use of their local knowledge, skills, and capital in order to do the right thing. 

Comments

[Jay]

great post. Opened my eyes.
Thanks...

[GeorgeNYC]

Wrong!!!!!

Unfortunately none of this is the result of your free market capitalist fantasy-land but of good old-fashioned union labor.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/1/16/11125/1166/655/684821

You should probably look to the safety record of such free-market utopias like say . . . . Russia or maybe parts of Africa.

[Steve Horwitz]

Well George is probably not gonna come back and read this but if he does, I'd love to know how the fact that many of the rescuers involved were union members is in any way evidence against my claim that non-governmental entities were a crucial part of the rescue, especially when unions, per se, are not antithetical to a free market.

But I'm not really expecting a response.

[GeorgeNYC]

Wrong again.

I did come back.

I am interested in knowing what types of unions would not be antithetical to a free market? That is, absent some form of government legal support there is an obvious free rider problem that would inevitably destroy virtually any union.

In my view, the corporation is actually the largest government interference in the market. Essentially, the government gives capital investors limited liability for all but the most egregious misdeeds. In fact, given the structure of a corporation it is all but impossible to ascribe criminal liability because of the vast diffusion of responsibility.

That being said, unions are the obvious counterweight to that government interference.

If capitalists were held accountable to their last penny for any damage caused by their activities, I might actually believe more strongly in the power of the market. Otherwise, the externalities simply overwhelm the pricing mechanism.

Of course, it is easy in hindsight to simply praise the free-market. However, this was an occasion where the intervention was successful. The real question you should be asking is, without unions and their "bureaucratic" rules protecting workers, what happens in the 99 other times where workers divert a ship in circumstances that end up being a waste of time. It is the layers of legal protection fought for by unions that allow for this behavior that might not otherwise be considered "efficient" by the market.

quite frankly, I see absolutely no reason for a rational corporation to ever risk its assets in such an operation. There is limited possibility of profit and, in fact, quite a real possibility of liability should the attempted rescue fail. In the alternative world where these ships collided and ended up killing one or two passengers, you would have had counsel to these corporations urging that these ships not respond unless "ordered" to by local authorities. (of course, there are probably some maritime "rules of the road" that require such activities. But those are only effective if enforced by the government).

Unfortunately this is a good example of economists seeing something work in practice and trying to figure out if it can work in theory.