Before we get to anything or anybody else, it’s vitally important to discuss FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Administration]. Shortly after the San Francisco earthquake that famously dropped a two-level highway on hundreds of cars and cracked the baseball stadium while a World Series game was being played, I spoke with a friend in the Bay Area who was a police officer on the scene. Deeply frustrated, he told me several hair-curling stories about the way these federal bureaucrats got in the way of real disaster relief workers, strutting around for the television cameras, trying to look important, following an agenda of their own that had little to do with what needed to be done.
FEMA, in fact, is an illegal organization. It’s mentioned nowhere in the Constitution (which lists the lawful powers of the government in Article I, Section 8), nor did anybody ever vote about it, neither you nor I, nor even the Congress. It was created out of thin air by Presidential fiat, and given unprecedented power to override, at gunpoint, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law in general.
Since the San Francisco earthquake, I have been paying attention. In all that time, I have never heard anybody, civilian or local official, who had anything to say about FEMA that didn’t make it seem like a combination of the Nazi Gestapo and the Black Death. Apparently there is no situation so tragic and overwhelming that they can’t make it even worse. FEMA has an unanswerable power of life and death over entire communities and there is nothing to protect those communities — or anything else that is uniquely American — from its foul dictatorial grasp.
L. Neil Smith, “Good Mornin’ America, How Are Ya?”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-04.
February 6, 2026
QotD: FEMA
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