FEMA Spends More Preparing for Terrorism Than Hurricanes

> Until we solve some fundamental limiters like limitless free energy, there will always be more demand for support and aid than there will be support and aid available. This means that those providing aid and support, just like venture capital and private equity, need to pick and choose where to provide support to maximize the utility from that support.

This is a ridiculous statement.

We literally helped rebuild Europe and Japan after WWII while growing our economy. Are you saying there are less energy and resources available 70 years later? Or that we would have been better off letting Europe fall into another post-war depression?

The sad irony is that practically every economy that we helped rebuild in that time now provides meaningful services for all of their citizens, including education, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, food, and protection from natural disasters. America has enough to provide basic services to everyone, but chooses not to based on deeply flawed morality excused with insane economic theory: socialism for the rich, and capitalism for everyone else.

> Speak for yourself. This attitude is exactly why local responses fail.

So in one breath you criticize me for being a cynic, and in the next you admit that my cynical attitude is prevalent enough to be the root cause of the bad things I said would happen as a result?

I never claimed it was a good attitude, I claimed that it was the dominant one. Most people can be relied on to be selfish in stressful situations. Are there instances where we all come together during trying times and help each other and do the whole inspirational humanity thing? Sure. But these situations are inspirational because they're not the norm. We should expect people to exhibit the typical attitude rather than the ideal one when designing our national disaster response policy.

> outside capital and support can help, but alone will not lead to their sustainability and growth.

This is plainly false. There are hundreds of counter examples all over the world, both today and throughout history. China, in spite of their other faults, has been doing this with multiple cities a year since the 90s, dragging tens of millions of people out of poverty in the process.

For these investments to work, they need to be sustained -- you can't turn the spigot on and off every four years. They need to be real investments, and sized appropriately -- lip service doesn't work. And it usually takes the better part of a generation for the improvements to materialize.

> Every step of the way, people come and join the community chasing social and economic reasons to join the community.

Now this is fantasy. Are you not aware of how many of the black communities in the South came to be, or why they ended up so impoverished? It didn't go anything like this. First we dragged people here against their will on slave ships. This lasted for 300 years. Then we ended slavery, but the slavers and their descendants were bitter about losing the war and had deeply held ideas about race, so they worked diligently to prevent the black community from prospering as a matter of policy via violence, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, redlining, unbalanced enforcement, etc. plenty of which continues to this day.

This is not lack of investment or lack of personal motivation, this is active sabotage. These communities are poor because they started out with nothing, and we've been curbstomping them for over a century.

> Some communities just don't have the core nugget of what is necessary to make it worth rendering aid

This is such a ridiculous take. These communities don't have what it takes? They weren't given the chance. Every time something good happened there, we came in and took it away.

The main issue I have with your original comment is that you're basically telling people in these communities -- people who can barely afford to keep a roof over their head, let alone save for hurricane preparations or for a big move -- "Gee, you should have planned better for this hurricane," "Gee, if you can't plan better, maybe you should get up and move," "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, mate."

The majority of the communities at the receiving end of the now annual hurricane are black and poor, and we are the reason they've been too poor to do any of that. Your comment is a tone-deaf slap in the face, and you are being rightly excoriated for it.

> already did, multiple times. Every single liberal industrialized nation is structured around economic markets, where the means of production are privately owned. By definition this means that the majority of the industrialized world is driven by economic self interest. There are of course variations here and there: you have the Anglo-Saxon model[1], the German Model[2] the Rhine model[3], etc. All just slightly varying accoutrements sprinkled over the same fundamental structure: how best to channel economic self-interest for the public good.

That is almost entirely orthogonal to your claim that there are no truly democratic industrialized nations.

>On my part, I literally just provided you with a list of the most economically free countries. They include (in order): Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Canada, and the Netherlands, among many others. They correlate strongly with most accepted lists of so-called “happiest countries”. This directly refutes your claim that “we can witness countless examples of economic freedom increasing while happiness decreases”. If you’d like it directly spelled out for you, here’s the research that not only observes the same correlation, but attempts to even prove the causation.

I have not made claims about economic freedom, but material wealth. The best example is the US, where economic output has grown but happiness and life-satisfaction has decreased. As I said, this must be analyzed over a time series, your comparisons are useless for hundreds of reasons. So is your equivocation of economic output and economic freedom. There have been many cases in time-series of economic freedom increasing and happiness/life satisfaction decreasing, too. In fact, one of your studies even points that out, if you've read them in their entirety: hat is, shrinking the size of the government (i.e., reducing the tax burden on citizens) seems to be negatively related to subjective well-being.

Furthermore, it is trivially true that economic output and happiness are not causative, for the simple reason that in the last 30 years or so happiness and well-being have been decreasing while economic output has been skyrocketing.

It is also trivially true that aggregate economic freedom can increase while economic output can decrease.

Finally, I've never even made the claim that we should reduce economic freedom, or that markets are bad, or anything like that. I've made two claims - that the political self-interest of the masses is essentially different from their economic self-interest in that it can suit the goals of the individual better, and that well-being and happiness is only tangentially correlated to material wealth. From these premises I draw the conclusion that we should only pursue material wealth insofar as it actually benefits our well-being, and that government involvement in the economy can be good as long as the government is actually following the will of the people and that it is the best way to do so. So far you've been attacking a bizarre strawman, and have failed to back up your claims.