On Wednesday, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made headlines by saying that the federal government did not have enough funds to meet emergency needs through the hurricane season, which does not end with Helene.
Despite his careful wording, which acknowledged that it was the full hurricane season that was in doubt, but enough funds were on hand for the Helene disaster, Thursday’s assurances by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has the funds needed for ‘immediate response and recovery’ in the wake of Hurricane Helene’” were taken as a clarification. It was not. It was a mere restatement of Mayorkas’ initial point:
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas said. “We are expecting another hurricane hitting. We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”
President Joe Biden said Wednesday, Oct. 2, during a briefing that it will cost billions to recover from the storm and that Congress must ensure states have adequate resources. The funding shortage has led to outrage among Republicans.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded on X.
“This is easy.
Karah Rucker, “FEMA’s spending on hurricane disasters and migrants crisis under scrutiny,” Straight Arrow News, October 4, 2024.
“Mayorkas and FEMA — immediately stop spending money on illegal immigration resettlement and redirect those funds to areas hit by the hurricane.
“Put Americans first.”
Governor Abbott’s point was headlined with startling clarity by the editors of the New York Post: “Sorry, hurricane victims: Harris-Biden already spent your relief funds on migrants.” Those editors also restated a point Paul Jacob made earlier last week: “But don’t expect any of this to rise to the PR disaster that Hurricane Katrina proved for the George W. Bush administration: Too much of the media is running interference for Harris ahead of Election Day.”
First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice. Marx, its founder, concluded that the only way to abolish the class monopolies was to centralize and consolidate all industrial and commercial interests, all productive and distributive agencies, in one vast monopoly in the hands of the State. The government must become banker, manufacturer, farmer, carrier, and merchant, and in these capacities must suffer no competition. Land, tools, and all instruments of production must be wrested from individual hands, and made the property of the collectivity. To the individual can belong only the products to be consumed, not the means of producing them. A man may own his clothes and his food, but not the sewing-machine which makes his shirts or the spade which digs his potatoes. Product and capital are essentially different things; the former belongs to individuals, the latter to society. Society must seize the capital which belongs to it, by the ballot if it can, by revolution if it must. Once in possession of it, it must administer it on the majority principle, though its organ, the State, utilize it in production and distribution, fix all prices by the amount of labor involved, and employ the whole people in its workshops, farms, stores, etc. The nation must be transformed into a vast bureaucracy, and every individual into a State official. Everything must be done on the cost principle, the people having no motive to make a profit out of themselves. Individuals not being allowed to own capital, no one can employ another, or even himself. Every man will be a wage-receiver, and the State the only wage-payer. He who will not work for the State must starve, or, more likely, go to prison. All freedom of trade must disappear. Competition must be utterly wiped out. All industrial and commercial activity must be centered in one vast, enormous, all-inclusive monopoly. The remedy for monopolies is monopoly.
Benjamin R. Tucker, Liberty 5.16, no. 120 (March 10, 1888), pp. 2 – 3, 6.
Such is the economic programme of State Socialism as adopted from Karl Marx.
On October 5, 1910, the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown and a republic declared.
This is sparked, I’m sorry to say (and pun) by hurricane victims in Florida, at least six of whom had their houses catch fire after their electric vehicles caught fire after their vehicles were submerged in water. Florida’s chief financial officer and fire marshal Jimmy Patronis put the number higher, at 16, of burning “EVs in the Tampa Bay area alone, including Pinellas County.”
“So far.”
When it floods, it burns.
“The governor had warned EV owners in Florida to get their vehicles to higher ground ahead of Helene’s arrival,” explains Jacob Burg, in the above-mentioned Epoch Times piece, “as contact with saltwater can short-circuit the batteries, causing a catastrophic chain reaction known as thermal runaway in which heat energy is released from the battery to cause a fire.”
I’ve been seeing quite a few reports that EVs don’t do well in extreme conditions. The cold, for one, where the batteries don’t work properly, and the heat, for another, when they can too easily catch fire. And now this “submersion” menace.
Electric vehicles sure do appear to demonstrate a technology still in its infancy.
One the government shouldn’t be pushing on us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Triumphant individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked in spite of itself, by considerations of the general good. How often have French critics confessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the superior socialization of the French intelligence, France has yet to learn from America the art and habit of devoting individual fortunes to the good of the community.
Bliss Perry, The American Mind (1912), pp. 81 – 82.