Big Government and the FEMA Coffins

While I find the Libertarian Temptation more compelling as time passes, I remain of the opinion that in the world as it exists today, there are certain Important Jobs for which government is by far the best qualified batch of rotten bastards to do. The threat of Plague afoot in the realm concentrates the mind to grapple with such bitter and uncomfortable eventualities.

Among them is the story of the FEMA coffins (Google it for yourself), which has been making the rounds of the fever swamps for at least a year or two. In brief, an investigative citizen-journalist claims to have uncovered a secret storage site where the state has stockpiled millions of cheap plasto-coffins. From there it devolves directly into the usual Mad Libs routine of conspiracy theory, and if you read enough discussion boards you'll find out that the government knows but can't stop it, is the cause of it, that it started with the Republicans or the Democrats, Al Qaeda, the Pope, is a manufactured virus or a natural mutation, that it will wipe out 90% of the population, or one city will get nuked, and so on. They're not worth tangling with because it's always turtles all the way down.

A lot of people start by saying, "the government really doesn't have a stockpile of a million coffins," and go on to explain that it's an ordinary commercial distribution center (roughly 2.5 million people died in the US last year and needed to be buried somehow), or that the video is entirely fake or heavily exaggerated.

Me? I hope that the government really does have a stockpile of corpse-handling accessories in some geographically-convenient location(s). Let's face it, sometimes Shit Just Happens. The list of unlikely-but-possible scenarios that cause a really large number of our fellow citizens (and undocumented workers eligible for government-provided cheap-ass body disposal) to unexpectedly leave this mortal coil is neither short nor reassuring. What I can say with conviction is that if the Mexico City Pig Sniffles should cause half of my neighbors to croak, and me and the other half are forced to plant them in holes in the local dog park to prevent a zombie apocalypse, you can pretty much write me off as anything other than a rifle-toting revolutionary.

I really hope the CDC can prevent the pandemic, or at least limit us to a small number cinematically-heartbreaking scenes where attractive young couples are separated into groups of Grim Survivors and Noble Martyrs. But should that fail, the goddam National Guard had better show up with hazmat suits, rifles, and trucks to cart away the dead.

It is against this gruesome backdrop that I live out my greatest disgust with Big Government's sense of priorities. At this moment we're confronting what is arguably the most ominous threat to our collective health in a decade (if not a generation), with virtually none of Health and Human Services' senior offices filled. Our first real alert to the situation in Mexico came from Canada. Institutions rarely become more effective or intelligent with increasing size, and the bureaucratic imperatives that drive government make this tendency even more injurious than in private enterprise.