Paul Krugman: The GOP's Privatization Pathology

Let me take a moment to flag an issue others have been writing about in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy: The weird Republican obsession with killing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Kevin Drum, a political blogger at Mother Jones magazine, has the goods: they just keep doing it.

"At a deep ideological level, Republicans believe that federal bureaucracies are inherently inept," Mr. Drum wrote on Oct. 30, "so when Republicans occupy the White House they have no interest in making the federal bureaucracy work. And it doesn't. Democrats, by contrast, take government services seriously and appoint people whose job is to make sure the federal bureaucracy does work. And it does.