A States Rights argument against Federal Aid for Fulton County

Now that the flood waters have lowered a bit, I wanted to take a few minutes on this quiet Sunday evening to make the case that Fulton County NOT get aid from the federal government.

While I understand that many are suffering because of recent events, and they certainly should be helped, it is my personal belief that only the State of Georgia, along with any private charities, should be responsible for helping them through this crisis.

The whole point of a monetary system is to assign value to certain items, places, people, services. The whole point is the correct distribution of assets. It should not surprise anyone that there are certain parts of the country where you would not be flooded even if it did rain like that and it probably wouldn't anyways - my childhood home of Seattle, WA immediately comes to mind. In the Seattle Area, there are very strict regulations that prohibit you from building on flood plains. As a result, only a handful of communities built before these regulations were in effect ever get flooded to begin with. What's even better, the floodprone areas are reserved for farming, keeping local agriculture close to the city center and allowing for easy expansion of railways and classification yards if made necessary by industrial growth.

In addition, as Fargo, North Dakota demonstrated earlier this year, the elbow grease and hardwork of the townspeople, or local government, can be a far more powerful protector and rebuilder then anything that dispassionoate, hardhearted FEMA could ever muster. They saved their town completely, the floodwaters never breached their sandbags.

If Georgia is not willing to regulate its' building, it should either pay the cost of repair work and humanitarian aid like a gentleman, pursue the grace of voluntary donors, or improve the land to handle future flooding, while also picking up its' current bill. Preferably, it should do all three.

When states pay for their own disasters, the natural disadvantages of living in that state are fairly, justly, and correctly measured against the citizens, driving out business to safer states and places, and making states responsible for their own maintenance. What's even better, as states are more responsible for their own maintenance, federal government will have both less mandate and less ability to interfere in their governance. States Rights and States Responsibilities go hand and hand.