Milton Friedman's WSJ op-ed today seizing on the Katrina catastrophe as an opportunity to shill yet again for his school vouchers brainchild really ought to embarrass even his biggest fans. (It won't, but it ought to). Right now it remains very much an open question when and whether closed New Orleans schools - public or private - and the families who used to live in the city will even come back.  And the reason for that high and rising degree of uncertainty is that, as Friedman's fellow Nobelist Thomas Schelling said in yesterday's LA Times (thanks, Elizabeth), "There is no market solution to New Orleans." Got that, Professor Friedman? Your ideology isn't working just now and people are finally starting to notice, so please don't try to change the subject.

The kinds of vouchers that low-income evacuees really could benefit from, as many progressives and even a handful of conservatives have been pushing unsuccessfully for, would help them to afford rents in locations where they could be integrated into communities rather than corralled en masse in trailer parks, shelters, mobile homes, motels, etc., as many continue to be.

A policy focused on housing vouchers would be far more likely to enable evacuees to live half-way decently at lower cost to the government than the current approach of building and managing cheap housing and directly paying property owners.  The vouchers strategy worked on a much smaller scale after the Northridge earthquake, as Bruce Katz and Mark Muro of Brookings have argued.

It's no mystery why the administration and Congress aren't going to expand the Section 8 housing voucher program for Katrina victims, even temporarily. Conservative Republicans have been trying to cut it for years, and continue to do so, not only because it focuses on the poor but also because it works. The bipartisan, Congressionally chartered Millennial Housing Commission in 2002 described the Section 8 program as "flexible, cost-effective, and successful in its mission." And we can't have that, can we? Conservatives might not have been able to knock off Social Security, the ultimate embodiment of successful government, but housing vouchers have no such political reinforcements in their defense.    

The unwillingness of Friedman and many of his followers to pay much more than lip service to a market-oriented policy like housing vouchers in the wake of Katrina is revealing. What are the big differences between school vouchers and housing vouchers at a time when the need for housing is far more urgent?

1.    School vouchers advance the right's goal of undermining the public school system; housing vouchers serve no such purpose, particularly now that government is basically out of the business of building low-income housing projects -- thank goodness.

2.    If the public comes to recognize housing vouchers as an effective strategy for alleviating poverty, where will it all lead? More federal spending on the poor! School vouchers only involve moving state and local money from the public sector to private/ "faith-based" hands.

3.    Housing vouchers have evolved over time largely through bipartisanship - a silly, anachronistic concept. School vouchers are identified much more closely with the conservative movement.          

Helping real people in the real world or advancing the cause no matter what? Where Milton Friedman leads, the right will continue to follow.