Military town markets: Why a catastrophic natural disaster, that would wipe out most of Fayetteville, North Carolina, would be for “Fayettenam’s” own good.

A 2015 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell -- and several other publications -- suggested that the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 culminated in an ultimate, net benefit to many of those affected, and evacuated from the city following the storm.

Why? Because life in New Orleans was already so dysfunctional for so many of those people, and opportunities were so scare, to begin with – even before the storm – that they were better off nearly anywhere they could have been sent. The only reason they hadn’t left already was because even if they could afford to move to another city, they could never have imagined that things might be better somewhere else.

Many of course decided to stay wherever they happened to be evacuated as a result of the storm (Houston, Texas, in a lot of cases, which is above-average in terms of where your chances would be best, if you wanted to go to a strange big city, start your life over from scratch, and seek your fortune), and New Orleans permanently lost a lot of its population.

The only place they could have been sent, where they would have been worse off, the article noted prominently, would have been . . . Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Congratulations, Fayetteville. 

Not too many cities in the country – not even Detroit – can claim that the best thing that could happen to so many of the people of who live in them would be to be displaced by a catastrophic natural disaster. Fayetteville, like New Orleans prior to Katrina, is overpopulated. 

It could be said that they literally need to run off some people.

Why don't we make the minimum wage in the US $100 an hour? That would get rid of poverty!

Because you don't want to pay $1000-2000 per night for a hotel room.

Minimum-wage laws are inflationary. A mandatory ten-fold increase in wages can only be dealt with by means of generating a nearly ten-fold increase in the revenues needed to pay it -- meaning that we lay on a nearly ten-fold increase in prices to consumers.

They don't really help the people they're intended to help. No one really benefits any from raises in the minimum wage for low-end wage earners except for low-end landlords (most often, slumlords who shouldn't be allowed to be landlords, at that) - the rent goes up to wipe out the increased income of the low-end tenants.

The minimum-wage model is not a good model at all to insure a living wage for workers at the lower end of the pay scale.

Here, try this instead - I bet it would work: