My Week in Haiti - Robert P. Murphy - Mises Daily

My Week in Haiti - Robert P. Murphy - Mises Daily: "Apparently the tax code was based on completed houses, and so the residents of Leogane would make sure their buildings were in a perpetual state of construction, legally speaking."

"Imposing US building codes in Haiti wouldn't have saved hundreds of thousands of people; it would simply have made them homeless all these years."

"During my short visit, one of the major themes relayed to us from the Haitians who interacted with our base was that the locals viewed us with suspicion. In particular, when they would see a team of HODR volunteers engaging in literal hard labor, using sledgehammers and wheelbarrows to remove rubble from a collapsed residence, many of the Haitians apparently resented the fact that we were 'stealing their jobs.' In other words, the Haitians — where unemployment is apparently 90 percent — thought they should be getting paid to remove the rubble from their collapsed homes.

When those who were affiliated with HODR would explain to the people that we were all volunteers, some of them were still suspicious. They speculated that even if we weren't being paid right then, we would probably be paid when we returned back home.

Now here's what struck me about all this: isn't it incredible that after their neighborhoods got wiped out, and hundreds of thousands of Haitians died, that many Haitians were apparently devoting a lot of mental effort to speculating on how much we were getting paid to cart away their rubble? "