Over at Slate, there’s an article headlined “Washington Man Wearing Anti-Government T-Shirt Thanks Firefighters for Saving His Home.” The article is based on a news photo of a man in Washington state who’s wearing a T-shirt from the conservative grassroots group FreedomWorks that says “Lower Taxes + Less Government = More Freedom,” shaking hands with firefighters. According to Ben Mathis-Lilley, this is supposedly an example of hypocrisy, as a number of state, local, and federal agencies are involved in fighting the forest fires that have been burning as of late in Oregon and Washington. And apparently it’s hypocritical enough that a private citizen must be made an object of national ridicule immediately after narrowly avoiding the destruction of his home.
To state the obvious, conservatives advocate “less government,” not no government. I am quite certain that fire departments and combatting natural disasters are very likely near the top of the list of things that conservatives are happy and eager to fund, to say nothing of the unseemly journalistic tendency of attacking private citizens for the sake of clickbait.
Apparently, Mathis-Lilley was feeling some blowback because he decided to update his post to justify his substanceless argument:
Again, Mathis-Lilley finds himself flailing for a justification. He’s certainly exposed quite a bit of ignorance about FEMA and the perfectly sensible reasons why conservatives take issue with the agency. For one thing, FEMA did not exist before 1979, and yet, states and the federal government still managed to fight forest fires and coordinate disaster relief without it. But since the agency’s inception it’s largely turned into a vehicle for distributing pork. I explained this in a WEEKLY STANDARD editorial a few years back:
For all the Bill Clinton nostalgia this election season, discussing FEMA is a sobering reminder that one of his real gifts was convincing people he was a good president rather than being one. As chronicled in Feeling Your Pain, James Bovard’s book on federal bureaucracy in the Clinton years, the former president exploited FEMA’s lack of a clear mission to transform the agency into a vehicle for patronage and pork. Clinton ballooned the agency to the point where it had 10 times as many political appointees as comparable federal agencies. (Clinton even appointed former Arkansas state trooper Raymond “Buddy” Young southwest regional FEMA director; Young would later be deposed in the Paula Jones lawsuit.) By the end of his presidency, Clinton was declaring a federal disaster somewhere in the country every week on average. Naturally, this resulted in defining disaster relief down. Following a California earthquake in 1994, FEMA sent out 47,000 unsolicited checks—a total of $142 million—to homeowners for no other reason than they lived in supposedly affected ZIP codes.
Bush and Obama did little if anything to rein in FEMA. Last year [2011], over 200 disaster declarations were made. Some FEMA emergencies, such as the response to Hurricane Sandy, are clearly warranted, but the vast majority are pork dressed up as compassion. States and municipalities have powerful incentives to beg for FEMA money at every opportunity—they let Uncle Sam pick up the tab and profit off of eventual insurance settlements. FEMA now routinely pays for costs associated with snow removal, even in places such as upstate New York, where these “disasters” are anticipated every winter. If you want a really pungent metaphor for how far afield the agency has strayed, President George W. Bush in early 2009 had his successor’s inauguration declared an emergency thereby allowing FEMA funds to help cover the costs of the festivities to local governments.
FreedomWorks is right to want to rein in FEMA, and Mathis-Lilley’s blind faith in the necessity of FEMA here is wholly misplaced once you know a thing or two about how federal disaster relief is determined and distributed. But such is the state of our current leviathan: Even the most agreeable and important functions of the federal government are often invoked as cover for wasting money to achieve some dubious political end.
