The outer bands of Hurricane Sandy (Latest NWS Hurricane Center info) are looming over the eastern seaboard. The storm is so large that it could hit in DC, flood parts of New York, and still knock thousands of trees in North Carolina. Conboys of emergency vehicles are lined up, FEMA is set to swoop in and help. Which makes us wonder how Mitt Romney would deal with national emergencies:
Think Progress— KING: Governor Romney? You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?
ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.
Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot…
KING: Including disaster relief, though?
ROMNEY: We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.
The problem these assholes never want to recognize is there are a lot of things that aren’t profitable but that we need. Whisking storm victims off the roof of a flooded house by helicopter is never, ever going to be a money making proposition. Unless the federal government uses tax money to pay a private contractor, i.e. Mitt’s private sector, to do a job we already have dedicated professionals in the Coast Guard and FEMA trained and equipped to do. Hence the Dick Cheney rescue image above.
In the event of flooding, kindly pull yourself out of the water to safety by your own bootstraps.
Conflict of principal and practical. In any given case, a system of essentially anarchy is best, because the strong survive. Side note, interesting how closely social evolution parallels biological evolution, and how conservatives tend to dismiss one but praise the other. And yes, we have something like this in our economy; capitalism is watered down anarchy, in which those who do better reap more rewards.
However, any biologist will tell you that we’re human, and because of our ability to reason and think beyond our instinctive need for dominance, we are NOT subject to the same standards. We’re allowed to sacrifice for a greater good, or a different kind of good.
So whilst putting rescue efforts in private hands is economically sound in principal (competition drives down costs and increases quality), it is completely ineffective in practice, because rescue efforts are not something you can make money on. Unless the federal government is paying you. Hm.
That’s a thought, what would happen if romney was killed in the hurricane (which would, of course, have been caused by obama)? Who would take over the challenge, they just have to put their hand into the unlucky dip and pull out a different turd?
Lorax,
You’ve display a very naive and simplistic view of evolution: It is not the strong in the cartoon sense that survive in evolution by natural selection, nor would this necessarily be “good”. It is those that are best-adapted to procreate efficiently in the current situation which are favored in nature.
Furthermore, and this cannot be emphasized enough, the “natural” course of evolution is not necessarily “good” or “better” – it has almost led to human extinction once before, and there is not guarantee that it would bring anything desirable in the future.
As a side note, in a true anarchy, all those who insist on misspelling principle would get shot by my goon squad.
displayed
“If you can’t afford a helicopter to rescue you from a rooftop, borrow the money from your parents.” -Mitt
Oh yes, states. As if most states can cover their own major disasters. (Especially when they allow people to live/build in stupid places. Especially those in sea-level change denial.) And the private sector – hoo boy, how is that supposed to work? Who can maintain personnel and readiness for such things – profitably? Here comes the Nationwide rescue chopper! Woot! What, not insured to a certain level, specifically for this type of disaster, by us? Fuck you and good luck!
But, F, you completely underestimate the power of free markets combined with natural disasters. All the irresponsibly poor will have drowned the first time round, and only nicely insured people will be left.
See it’s far more moral not to fund disaster relief, that way some of those kids will never get to grow up and they’ll thank us for saving them from the debt in the afterlife.
Tyrant al-Kalām, indeed it is very likely I do, since there ain’t no such thing as a free market. Never had it, ha ha, never will.
If the free market types were ever really subjected to a free market, they’d be the first to cry about it.
They’d be happy to see the 47% killed off and everyone spared debt, but then they’d cry about that too, with no one to exploit, and already the birthrate is too low for their liking, so they’d just make more. (And then possibly notice, for a half second sometime, how the rich can become poor with no social safety nets, simply by chance.)
“knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off”
So our creditors are going to outlive us and come back for our kids? Are they vampires?
And what are they lending us? A dollar is functionally just a tax credit, so that’s not much good for enslaving our kids.