” (Mises 1962; Nozick 1974; Hayek 1979). Neoliberalism generally also includes the belief that freely adopted market mechanisms is the optimal way of organising all exchanges of goods and services (Friedman 1962; 1980; Norberg 2001). Free markets and free trade will, it is believed, set free the creative potential and the entrepreneurial spirit which is built into the spontaneous order of any human society, and thereby lead to more individual liberty and well-being, and a more efficient allocation of resources (Hayek 1973; Rothbard 2004). Neoliberalism could also include a perspective on moral virtue: the good and virtuous person is one who is able to access the relevant markets and function as a competent actor in these markets (Thorsen and Amund 2006). He or she is willing to accept the risks associated with participating in free markets, and to adapt to rapid changes arising from such participation (Friedman 1980). Individuals are also seen as being solely responsible for the consequences of the choices and decisions they freely make: instances of inequality and glaring social injustice are morally acceptable, at least to the degree in which they could be seen as the result of freely made decisions (Nozick 1974; Hayek 1976). If a person demands that the state should regulate the market or make reparations to the unfortunate who has been caught at the losing end of a freely initiated market transaction, this is viewed as an indication that the person in question is morally depraved and underdeveloped, and scarcely different from a proponent of a totalitarian state (Mises 1962). Thus understood and defined, neoliberalism becomes a loose set of ideas of how the relationship between the state and its external environment ought to be organised, and not a complete political philosophy or ideology (Blomgren 1997; Malnes 1998).

As a vehicle of neoliberalism, Disaster Capitalism precipitated the lacklustre responses to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy in the United States. Naomi Klein brought to the fore and popularized the notion of Disaster Capitalism. In her book The Shock Doctrine (2007), she described Disaster Capitalism as the “political economic processes that take advantage of mass trauma to impose neoliberal capitalist economic policies, facilitating the redistribution of wealth and exacerbating socio-economic divisions.” Other authors have aptly elucidated the concept as well. Disaster Capitalism is defined as “national and transnational governmental institutions’ instrumental use of catastrophe (both so-called natural and human-mediated disasters, including post conflict situations) to promote and empower a range of private, neoliberal capitalist interests” (Maldonado and Schuller 2016: 62). Disaster Capitalism is as much about the pre-disaster exclusion of a certain group of people from participating equally in the economic system, as it is the capital-driven strategies for recovery and rebuilding (Edwards 2016: 1). Disaster Capitalism constitutes of two parts (Maldonado and Schuller 2016: 62). Non-profiteering, which is the first, is the process whereby public agencies direct resources to private en