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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...

Today the NWS justifies itself on public interest grounds. It issues severe weather advisories and hijacks local radio and television stations to get the message out. It presumes that citizens do not pay attention to the weather and so it must force important, perhaps lifesaving, information upon them. A few seconds’ thought reveals how silly this is. The weather might be the subject people care most about on a daily basis. There is a very successful private TV channel dedicated to it, 24 hours a day, as well as any number of phone and PC apps. Americans need not be forced to turn over part of their earnings to support weather reporting...

NWS services can and are better provided by the private sector.

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Fox News, which never met a profit-over-people person or company it didn't want to tout, promote or force down the throat of its uneducated viewing audience, decided to publish - on the day Hurricane Irene wreaks havoc on 65,000,000 Americans - an editorial which basically says that having a "for-profit company (which will charge users every time they want to access their data) supply data would be a far superior way to report and analyze the weather than the government-run National Weather Service (NWS)." You actually have to read this article to see how ridiculous, insipid, greedy and ultimately how full of doublespeak the teabag class has become in their never-ending quest to wring every dollar out of unsuspecting Americans.

The authors are Iain Murray and David Bier - both "experts" at the really creepy Competitive Enterprise Institute - a "think tank" organization (a la the Heritage Foundation) that unabashedly proclaims everything in government and the public sector is wasteful, useless and politicized and that everything that corporations and pure capitalism does is of course good, benevolent and noble.

Who knew that the government reporting of the weather was some sort of subversive plot to brainwash America into liberal zombies whereas corporate for-profit weather reporting is just so philanthropic? There is truly no low for people like Murray and Bier.

Their insane arguments are so disingenuous and so obviously bent towards money over public good, I don't know even where to begin. Let's start with this one.

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As it stands today, the public is forced to pay more than $1 billion per year for the NWS. With the federal deficit exceeding a trillion dollars, the NWS is easily overlooked, but it shouldn’t be. It may actually be dangerous.

The figure of $1 billion for the cost of the NWS come straight from the NWS site. Let's say that is correct. That means every man, woman and child pays in America about $3.23 per year to get all the weather statistics, forecasts and data that is pumped to cable news, local news, The Weather Channel and private companies like AccuWeather for free or minimal charges. Three whole dollars per person! Can you imagine how much is would cost every person (or news organization) if they had to "register" with a private weather stat provider and pay annual fees or per-access charges. With recent decade of extreme weather (does anyone remember last winter in the Northeast?) and the fact that climate change (another concept I am positive the CEI would like to see disappear with the privatization of weather reporting) will continue to induce strange and excessive weather patterns - one does need to be a Wall Street wizard to see how profitable private weather reporting will become in a very short time

That $1 billion is actually cheap. There is no doubt the revenue to those "private" companies would rake in would far exceed the $1 billion the government allocates in funds to the NWS today. But to the teabag libertarian elitists aristocrats at places like the CEI, since everything the government does is horrible (or at least socialist), - even if it is a public service and more importantly - even if it is cheaper and probably better than what a private organization would charge and provide - the folks on the right have no qualms about saying (rather hammering home) that the NWS is just another insidious communist organization out to infiltrate America with weather queens driving Cadillacs...

I bet it comes as news to many people that the socialistic and now militaristic NWS actually stages some sort of bloodless broadcasting coup and forces 1000+ local stations, all cable outlets, and radio stations to jam such incredibly Marxist information as "buy water and batteries and take in the lawn furniture" down the throats of an unsuspecting public.

You can just hear the teabag chant "No weather for immigrants" or "Let it rain on their parade" or some other nonsense. Let's see how much the teabaggers will like paying for their weather if the NWS was defunded. Back in 2005, our favorite then-Senator...now Presidential candidate Rick Santorum proposed legislation that would have barred the NWS from publishing weather data to the public when private-sector entities, such as AccuWeather, perform the same function privately (for a fee!). Of course, Santorum neglected say that his campaign checks were being signed by Joel Meyers of AccuWeather, whereas everyone else would have had to pony up to companies like AccuWeather for information.

But why let the facts get in the way of a good excuse to make more money for the folks at the CEI, AccuWeather or the pocketbook of Rick Santorum at the expense of public information, safety or blown down trees. Besides a little rain never hurt anyone in a gated community.

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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.

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.

Does the NWS 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.