The Moral Foundations of Ending FEMA

The whole question of whether Mitt Romney wants to end FEMA because of his remarks during the Republican Primary.  His words bear repeating;

Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better.  Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut – we should ask ourselves the opposite question.  What should we keep? We should take all of what we're doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we're doing that we don't have to do?

Ruins of Galveston

 Romney's position on FEMA is moderate compared to some people's.  Ron Paul wants to abolish FEMA altogether and makes clear that he approves of the good old days when a hurricane destroyed Galveston and the federal government did nothing.*  Other right wingers have discovered a new reason to hate Hoover.  Not only did he cause the Great Depression with his overly interventionist response to the stock market crash, he had already proven himself a socialist by leading federal disaster relief during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.  

Liberals are baffled by all this.  Is it really possible for anyone to think it is better for Galveston destroyed than for the federal government to lift a hand to help?  So I will do what I now make my habit when conservatives advocate something that baffles my liberal sensibilities -- run it through Jonathan Haidt's moral analysis.  Haidt argues that liberals have tunnel vision when they focus solely on harm avoidance, with some secondary concerns for justice and freedom.  Instead, he says, liberals should consider that full range of moral foundations that conservatives value -- besides harm avoidance, justice and freedom, we should consider the value of in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and reverence for the sacred.  So, how to these values apply to disaster relief, especially to abolishing FEMA.  And are such arguments likely to have much traction?

Harm avoidance:

Obviously, disaster relief, including by FEMA, is about harm avoidance.  Everyone (I trust) agrees that mitigating harm during a natural disaster is good.  Disaster relief is always a popular charitable cause.  FEMA, when competently managed, plays a major role in harm mitigation.  What values beyond harm mitigation are opposed to FEMA?

Fairness/Justice:

Liberals, Haidt says, tend to equate justice with harm mitigation while conservatives and libertarians see it more as just deserts -- as karma.  He has even expressed concerns that this could go too far -- treating the mere fact that people have suffered misfortune as proof that their misfortunes were deserved.  For the most part, I do not see these concerns applying to natural disasters.  Natural disasters are perhaps the most obvious case possible for bad things happening to good people.  

But there are exceptions.  In every natural disaster, there are people who put themselves in needless danger by taking unnecessary risks.  These are people who don't buy insurance and want FEMA to cover all their losses, people who build in flood plains because they can get federal flood insurance, people who live next to the forest and refuse to clear their land as a firebreak and expect the Forest Service to protect their houses, people who defy evacuation orders despite being healthy and wealthy enough to leave and then expect to be rescued, and (for that matter) people who go hiking during blizzards or take excessively dangerous rock climbs and then expect search and rescue to save them.  I have considerable sympathy for conservatives who lack sympathy for such people.  They not only put themselves in danger, they endanger rescue workers and waste resources that might go to rescuing  people who are genuinely just unfortunate.  But these simply means that we should modify disaster relief somewhat to penalize people who take unreasonable risks.  Getting rid of FEMA altogether is a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Furthermore, I see no evidence that there is wide popular belief that most people caught in natural disasters are to blame for their own misfortunes.  Quite the contrary, the overwhelming response to a natural disaster is one of sympathy and helpfulness, with resentment toward the minority of people who take unnecessary risks as decidedly secondary.

Freedom:

I do not doubt that certain hardcore libertarians or conservatives do see FEMA as in infringement on liberty. These are the ones who oppose all redistributionist taxation as a form of "enslavement."  These are the people who assure you that they will be happy to make voluntary donations to rebuild Galveston, to tax them for the benefit of the people of Galveston is morally indistinguishable from kidnapping them off the streets, carrying the off to Galveston, and forcing them "at gunpoint" to work on a chain gang rebuilding the city.  The fact that paying a tax is less intrusive does not make it less of an infringement on freedom, just more insidious.  Ensuring that the funding for rebuilding Galveston is entirely voluntary is infinitely more important than whether Galveston is actually rebuilt.  In fact, whether Galveston is ever rebuilt at all is not an appropriate public policy concern.  Let us be plain here.  The real argument here is that harm mitigation is not a legitimate public policy concern at all -- only freedom and justice are proper concerns of public policy.**  At least one libertarian has taken this to its illogical conclusion -- if an asteroid were on a collision course with earth and government had the technology to destroy it, it would be better to let all life on earth be wiped out than to spend taxpayer funds to prevent such an outcome.

I do not think this is a viewpoint that is likely to ever have much popular support.  If the liberal view that public policy should be solely about harm reduction is unbalanced, the ultra-libertarian view that harm reduction has no proper role in public policy  In its most extreme form, very few people are likely to see allowing the world to end in order to avoid paying higher taxes as freedom-enhancing.  After all, Patrick Henry notwithstanding, you have to be alive to be free.  In its less extreme form, most people are also unlikely to see the ruin accompanying natural disaster and the confusion apt to follow when recovery relies solely on voluntary donations as freedom-enhancing.

Furthermore, government routinely respond to natural disasters with much more intrusive infringements on freedom than just taxing people to pay for the recovery.  Governments order people to leave their homes; they set of roadblocks keeping people from going home; they order all traffic except emergency responders off the street; they declare martial law and send in the National Guard.  And furthermore, these measures are generally accepted as necessary given the emergency.  People expect government to restrict their freedom during natural disasters in ways that would never be tolerated under more normal conditions.  People accept these restrictions as necessary for their protection. In short, during natural disasters, most people are willing to temporarily let harm minimization trump freedom.  And, what is more, I think most people tend to see more intrusive governmental actions are more freedom-limiting than less intrusive measures, like taxes, offensive as this may be to some libertarians.

Finally, this is just guesswork on my part, but I suspect that most people's objections to redistributionist taxation is more likely to take a conservative/justice perspective than a libertarian/ freedom perspective.  In other words, most people do not object so much to their taxes going to benefit someone else as to their taxes going to benefit someone they don't think deserves the benefit.  Just as a guess, I would say that if you asked most people what they would be willing to voluntarily donate to and what they would be willing to see their taxes pay for, the lists would be very similar.  And disaster relief ranks right up their with cancer research among causes that people like donating to.

Group Loyalty:

This is more fruitful ground.  People argue against FEMA not so much on the grounds of freedom, but of federalism.  Government has a legitimate role in disaster relief, just not the federal government. This is often expressed in terms of freedom -- federal government is seen as much more dangerous and oppressive than state government.  Or freedom is equated with strict constitutionalism -- confining the federal government strictly within the bounds set by Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, and any expansion beyond that undermines the rule of law and puts freedom in danger.

I am skeptical that this argument will get very far.  Most people do not draw as sharp a distinction between levels of government as many hard-core federalists might wish.  The idea that an act that is perfectly acceptable and popular if a state does it becomes a monstrous act of oppression if the federal government is involved is simply to rarified to have much popular currency.  

More promising is the argument that close-knit communities should pull together and rebuild out of their own resources.  This is an appealing idea.  And I will say that natural disasters seem to bring out all the best features of group loyalty -- bringing a community together, neighbors helping each other out, close cooperation for the good of the whole, the desire to be helpful and so forth.  And natural disasters seem to suppress the darker side of in-group loyalty -- an us-and-them outlook, and a narrowing of one's moral vision.  Natural disasters simultaneously strengthen in-group ties within a community and widen the circle of most people's sympathy.  They are the only instance I can think of in which those two tendencies are not opposed to each other.

But natural disasters also run up against the limits of group loyalty.  A large-scale disaster often overwhelms the resources of a local community to deal with it.  Are there communities so tight-knit and so distrustful of outsiders that they would turn down outside help under the circumstances?  Probably some Amish or Hasidic communities would (while drawing on help from other groups of Amish or Hasids), and perhaps some far-from-lovable cults.  But I doubt any mainstream community would turn down FEMA if its own resources were overwhelmed.

And local communities are not necessarily all that good at disaster relief, or inherently less oppressive than the federal government.  Certainly New Orleans was not during Katrina.  It should also be noted that the reason Hoover was put in charge of disaster relief in the 1927 flood, and why disaster relief began being seen as a federal responsibility was that local authorities were doing a terrible job.  Communities lacked resources to deal with the damage.  Black people were forced to work on the levees at gunpoint, left in flooded areas while white people were evacuated, imprisoned in refugee camps, and denied access to relief.  New Orleans officials deliberately blew up the levees protecting the poorer parts of town in order to spare the richer parts.  (No doubt this contributed to the widespread belief among black people that something similar happened during Katrina).

In short, I think that appeals to community loyalty as an argument against FEMA may very well have mainstream resonance, but are unlikely to survive the harsh reality of actually attempting the experiment.

Authority:

This might seem like an odd question even to raise.  After all, the government's authority is at its height in the wake of a natural disaster, and notably receives respect.  Government authority is only one kind, though.  Conservatives also value the authority of parents, clergy, employers, civic organizations, and so forth.  Indeed, I suspect one reason they distrust government is the fear that it will seize all authority to itself and undermine these other authorities.  During natural disasters, though, most people are willing to defer to the authority of government and accept the temporary subordination of these other possible sources of authority.

Purity and sanctity:

Haidt likes pointing out that many things liberals favor as harm mitigation strategies are deeply offensive to conservatives because they are seen as not merely passively allowing, but requiring active participation, in sin.  Examples include offering free birth control, drug legalization, needle exchange programs, and so forth.  Needless to say, disaster relief does not fit into this category.

Another party of purity/sanctity that Haidt does not explore as much is seeing certain things, or people, as defiling.  In this case, the source of defilement would be the federal government itself.  The federal government would be seen as a sort of toxic chemical, necessary in some cases, but to be confined so as to prevent its contamination of our otherwise pure society.  I suspect that certain libertarians or hard-core federalists really do see it in these terms.  By contrast, the United States as a country, is clearly seen as sacred, hence the outrage over what liberals dismiss as trivial symbolic issues, like flag burning.  Furthermore, there is ample evidence that the United States is seen as more sacred than any state or municipality.  School children pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag, not to their state flags.  Sports events begin with the Star Spangled Banner.  How many people even know their state song?  Many states fly a large U.S. flag with a smaller state flag below it, on a single flag pole.

Granted, the country is not the same as the government.  But the existence of a country more or less implies that it has a government.  And if people truly see their government as a desecration polluting everything it touches, even something so popular and uncontroversial as disaster relief, then that government has a serious legitimacy crisis at hand.  I do not see such a crisis with us.

CONCLUSION:

Some extreme libertarians or federalists may see federal disaster relief as an outrage against freedom, or as a desecration of the purity of sacred federalism.  I doubt very much, though, that either of these ideas has much potential to go mainstream.  Two criticisms of FEMA may have some mainstream currency.  One is that is subsidizes people who put themselves in danger by taking excessive risks.  This, though, sounds more like  a call to reform FEMA to penalize the irresponsible than reason to abolish it.  The other is that it infringes on the self-sufficiency of communities and discourages them from rebuilding with their own resources.  This argument may, indeed, have mainstream appeal.  It is unlikely, though, to survive for long in the face of the harsh realities of communities whose resources are overwhelmed.  In short, I believe that abolishing FEMA is one of the ideas that appeals to portions of the Republican party faithful, but is unlikely to be popular to anyone else.  And the Republican party faithful seriously overestimate their numbers compared to the general population.

PS:  And right on cue, here we have just that:  An expression of fear that if government does too much in terms of disaster relief, people will lose their resilience and self-reliance and be unable to come to the aid of their neighbors.  I file that under group loyalty, and consider it the best critique of FEMA.  But I don't see it as a plausible argument for abolishing it.

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*To be fair to Ron Paul, even in the absence of any government intervention whatever, Galveston would not be as badly devastated now as it was in 1900.  The technology did not exist then to know in advance when a hurricane would strike.  
**This view does allow for harm mitigation in the form of law enforcement and national defense.  But these can be defended in terms of justice -- punishing the guilty as well as protecting the innocent.