Reason magazine’s Daniel Rothschild provides a libertarian/anarchist/capitalist/localist and generally anti-bureaucracy view of the efforts of the everyday people of the gulf coast to rebuild their Katrina smashed communities.

Myths of Hurricane Katrina Three: The Gulf Coast is suffering from a lack of leadership

But leadership isn’t something you are elected into. There have been plenty of leaders on the Gulf Coast over the last two years. It’s just that their names don’t roll off the tongues of magazine editors, or appear in newspapers or campaign ads.
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If there’s any good news to come out of the recovery effort it’s that people in the hurricane zone have learned to become less reliant on political saviors and more reliant on themselves.
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Enter FEMA. FEMA officials told Voitier she’d need to have a “kickoff meeting” before she could open the schools-where she’d meet not with parents, or students, or teachers, but with a federal environmental protection team, a historical preservation team, and the “404-” and “406-mitigation teams” (terms which refer to specific sections of the Stafford Act, the law that covers federal disaster response). And it wasn’t a “meeting” so much as an introduction to the vast bureaucracy that was FEMA’s “education task force,” basically a list of barriers Voitier would have to clear before she could start classes.
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Voitier decided to cut her losses and reopen the schools without FEMA’s help. She says she adopted a “the heck with you guys” approach. “We can do it, we’ll make it happen, and we’ll send you the bill.” Before Thanksgiving, Voitier opened her first school, and 334 students attended the first day of classes. By the last day of the year, there were 2,360, and over 3,000 on the first day of the next.