Well, my red canaries have alerted me to the fact that Los Angeles is currently dealing with some nearly once-in-a-century wildfires while my blue canaries have been silent. While the second-nature routine of facetious thoughts and prayers, fake news and RedCross donation drives are back at it again, many have said that an overhaul is needed. While the mouthpieces have quipped that California’s leadership needs to change, that thinking is far too small. For best results, we need to attack the root of the problem; the mere existence of FEMA and the practice of dishing out federal dollars for a state of emergency that was entirely predictable. Light your torches from the California embers as I walk you through why.
Currently, states do not nearly allocate the resources they should towards disaster relief, even as so-called freak occurrences keep happening on a more regular basis. This is because when the going gets tough, the leadership of many states, red and blue, universally call upon their Sugar Daddy: Drunk Uncle Sam. Thus, for my radicalized canaries reading this, your tax dollars are going to help people who ideologically disagree with you(dun dun dun!!). Phrased another way, the government is directly funding domestic terrorism.
By eliminating FEMA, states will have to bear the costs of the disaster relief and rebuilding after natural occurrences. This will need to become a necessary line item in their annual budget, particularly in states that commonly have earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, and the like. More importantly, this will also serve as a good litmus test as to which states genuinely believe in climate change or not. States that believe in the science of climate change will allocate more of their funding to disaster relief efforts, while skeptical states will reduce (or eliminate entirely) this part of their budget. As sham artist Ryan Holiday puts it; it’s not a principle until it costs you money.
A large part of the reason that the hills of Los Angeles are burning is so devastating is because insurance companies in CA dropped fire coverage a few months ago. Why’d they do that, you ask? They were unable to raise premiums to cover the increasing likelihood of a total loss, because of government price-fixing. If all of that sounds socialist AF, that’s because it is. While politicians and pundits may blindly follow rhetoric, rest assured that actuaries absolutely do not have this same bent; they follow hard data, solid evidence, and literally nothing else. Insurance companies are absolute masters at risk calculation and are heavily incentivized to price risk appropriately
The government needs to get out of the business of disaster relief and insurances as a whole anyways. Even if they did it well, which they don’t, it still sets a bad precedent that Drunk Uncle Sam will come in and save the day. Thus, states will continue to not prepare adequately. This goes for flood insurance as well too. For the longest time, only the Feds were able to sell it (thankfully, that is no longer the case). These are problems that are best left for local governments and the free markets to decide. If a state government opts to under-prepare and not aid their people in response to a disaster, then the people will vote for change, with either a ballot or a U-Haul truck. Speaking of…
“But Dan, what about the people affected by natural disasters? If they’re displaced, then they’ll have to abandon their homeland and uproot their entire lives!” some misguided reader will throw at me. Well, I hate to break it to you, my historically-ignorant reader, but moving within the nation for better economic opportunities is nothing new here in America. It’s been happening for over a century and it still goes on.
Besides, we all stand around acting like FEMA is this grand hero who miraculously comes through for the impacted. This just simply is not the case. FEMA has been plagued since it’s inception with slow response times and financial overruns since at least the days of Hurricane Katrina. The trend hasn’t gotten any better from the Bush administration either . This is hardly a surprise because the bottom one-third of each graduating class winds up working for the government.
DOGE it up, Mr. Musk
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