Right-wing libertarians attack the National Weather Service, prove utter idiocy of libertarianism

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Distributorcap wrote about this yesterday, and I encourage you to check out his excellent post. I just couldn't resist adding my take.

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The libertarian project, very much at the core of today's movement conservatism and Tea Party-dominated Republican Party, as much as (if not more than) theocratism, is essentially to dismantle as much of government as possible. Indeed, were libertarians to get their way, it's not clear what would be left. Maybe just enough of a police state to protect property, specifically the property of the wealthy. They may bill themselves as advocates of freedom, but what libertarians really are is advocates of the Hobbesian state of nature, of a state without much of a state, a state more about power than freedom.

Take, for example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian think tank funded by the Koch brothers and the usual suspects from the world of Big Business and right-wing foundations, an organization dedicated to global warming denialism, the deregulation of everything (that is, anything corporate so that business can do as it likes), and the destruction of government. Just how extreme is it? It thinks the National Weather Service (NWS), including the National Hurricane Center, is unnecessary:

As Hurricane Irene bears down on the East Coast, news stations bombard our televisions with constant updates from the National Hurricane Center.

While Americans ought to prepare for the coming storm, federal dollars need not subsidize their preparations. Although it might sound outrageous, the truth is that the National Hurricane Center and its parent agency, the National Weather Service, are relics from America's past that have actually outlived their usefulness.

Its argument is basically three-fold:

1) Business, such as the insurance industry, has an interest in weather and would therefore do the NWS's job. (As it is, the NWS is just "corporate welfare.") Indeed, private weather services, such as AccuWeather, do a better job than the NWS.

2) The NWS costs $1 billion. At a time of huge deficits and necessary fiscal restraint, that's way too much. It should be cut.

3) The NWS makes mistakes.

Four idiotic components of an idiotic argument. Here, I'll let Steve M. explain:

You know why AccuWeather and the Weather Channel stay in business? Because they take the basic weather data that the National Weather Service provides and they refine it. They are provided raw meteorological data provided at the public domain level by, you guessed it, that barbarous and outdated relic known as the NWS. Otherwise, we need to abolish the NWS because they're not 100%, and the Magic Of Liberty Free Market power will make forecasts more accurate... if you are willing to pay for them. The weather service providers take a public service and make it better. If anyone's guilty of corporate welfare here, it's AccuWeather and the Weather Channel, who take the free data provided and then make money off of it.

That of course is not mentioned in this idiotic tirade where meteorologists are added to the list of government evil that must be drowned in Grover Norquist's Bathtub Of Liberty. Because the NWS doesn't have enough funding, they are dangerous and should be eliminated so that, why exactly? We live in a world where weather forecasts are only available to those who can afford it? As global climate change makes weather patterns more erratic and dangerous, are these morons really saying that we need to cut the NWS and privatize all weather prediction, so that the rich survive and the ignorant poor are literally washed away?

Generally, $1 billion a year is a drop in the budgetary bucket and a small price to pay for a valuable service like the NWS -- a service for the common good, for the general welfare, not merely for rich corporations, a service that feeds our understanding of the weather in a way that no private service could.

Does it make mistakes? Of course. The NWS is very much about forecasting -- say, about predicting where a hurricane will go. That's hardly a perfect science. You can't predict with absolute accuracy the course of a hurricane. But at least it tries, and at least it does so without a corporate agenda, and it seems to me it does a remarkably good job.

But no matter. The CEI has its extremist libertarian agenda, just as the Tea Party does, just as so much of the GOP does. And, you'll note, this piece appeared at... Fox News.

Even with a massive hurricane slamming into the U.S., even with lives and livelihoods threatened, with people evacuated and property damaged, even with the urgent need for disaster relief, we are told that government is bad, that anything that hinders business in any way is bad.

The libertarian project is utterly idiotic. In attacking the National Weather Service, its advocates only serve to reinforce that idiocy.