| | Cottontail, I’ve made clear the difference between giving aid to Florida and Indonesia so I’m not going back over that.
What I didn’t make clear and what I’m going to go over now is why a state in this country deserves disaster aid. First of all, most of the time they do not, I think we too often declared ‘federal disaster areas’ when they are not needed. In many disasters, the free market can easily pick up the pieces, that’s what insurance is for. But in a true disaster, there are simply too many people with too many needs involved for enterprise to handle. Frequently, local help is also damaged or destroyed so help must come from far away. The problem is disasters occur too infrequently for people to be completely prepared for them.
Take Florida again for example, you think the aid that was sent there was used to rebuild houses or building? Of course not, most people had hurricane insurance, they would be covered. What they didn’t have is food or clothes or clean water, the safe could have made it through the storm fine but what are you going to buy?
I look at aid to the states in two ways; both of them show that disaster relief is part of the government’s duty we gave it. The first is government’s duty to protect us from external and internal threats, just because a storm doesn’t have a mind behind it doesn’t make it any less of a threat. As citizens, we are responsible for our own protection to the best of our abilities but we have also charged the government with helping us too. Imagine if an invading army attacked part of a state and we later drove them out; wouldn’t the government be obligated to help with emergency aid? The second way is a type of insurance for the states. Imagine you went through an earthquake in California and when it was over, your house and property were in perfect condition but the rest of the city was a disaster. Insurance cannot work on a state wide scale because people have to be able to work together to survive and clean up everyone’s mess, not just their own; insurance does not lead to cooperation. We do not live in a vacuum and if we want to help ourselves, we have to help others. The government is the solution for this, we all pay taxes so in part we would get out money back, we can get emergency aid that we couldn’t get anywhere else, spreading disease would be kept to a minimum, and the economy would be up and running soon enough; even if you’re business survived, without general aid who would sell to?
Every state is hit with a disaster every now and then; hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, floods, blizzards, ice storms, you get my point. Cottontail is trying to say we have no more in common with each other then with Indonesians. This is a country, this is our country and most of us have a vested interest in either preventing disasters here or doing our best to aid the victims. Those interest are significantly less in other countries; they do not send money to help us, they are not fellow citizens, and they frequently work against our interests.
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Look at the man in the center left and tell me we should be helping these people.
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