"Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job. He said it was 'immoral' for the federal government to do all these things if it means increasing the debt. It’s an absurd notion, but it’s fully in line with decades of Republican resistance to federal emergency planning. FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen." -- today's New York Times editorial, which is worth reading in its entirety.
The problem with the right-wing Rethug "philosophy of government", to the extent that it's coherent, is that it runs into a wall when you consider what would happen if individual states -- or worse yet, for-profit corporations -- were solely responsible for disaster relief in their jurisdictions. Disasters don't follow state and local boundaries, and disaster relief shouldn't be coin-operated. But then again, that's the way right-wing Rethugs think.
