Anti-Government Insanity - Oklahoma Edition

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So yeah, there was a tornado outside Oklahoma City, and yeah, there was damage, and yeah, there were deaths.  But god forbid we do anything preventative against the next tornado.
This from the Star Tribune
 [There is] a general resistance to government mandates in politically conservative states such as Oklahoma, where tornadoes are most prevalent. Even the director of an association of storm shelter manufacturers, based in Texas, is opposed to a storm shelter mandate for new homes.
"Any time a governmental entity says `thou shalt' and tries to take an individual decision into the public domain, it's going to get pushback, and you're also going to raise the cost of things," said Ernst Kiesling, executive director of the National Storm Shelter Association and a retired civil engineering professor Texas Tech University.
And this from Steve Eddy - the City Manager of Moore (ground zero for the tornado damage) via NPR
We're a pretty independent lot around here in terms of telling me what I have to do and what I don't have to do.[...] Lives, you can't count the cost or the value of lives, but you can count the cost of construction. It adds a significant amount of cost to construction. The taxpayers would have to determine whether they're going to pay that or not.
One wonders where they think the FEMA money comes from?
Then again, that may be the point - when there is a disaster, FEMA pays, which basically means the rest of the country is ponying up to deal with the damage.  So, I guess the "taxpayers" in Moore are actually the smart ones - they don't put in storm-shelters (because of the cost), and when damage occurs, someone else pays for it.

A good bargain I guess...

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