Just like in West, Texas, where this idiotic antagonism towards government led directly to deaths, here's a homebuilder in Oklahoma talking about the same thing, but this time with respect to legislated tornado shelters (IN TORNADO ALLEY!):

“Most homebuilders would be against that because we think the market ought to drive what people are putting in the houses, not the government.”

Yup - let the market decide who lives and who dies. The all-knowing, all-forgiving, wonderful "market."

Isn't legislating tornado shelters the same as legislating the requirement to wear seat belts?

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It's official: Texas is now the Stupidest State in the Nation! Yay! Profits over Lives!

Texas has also had the nation's highest number of workplace fatalities -- more than 400 annually -- for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas' more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012.

Federal officials and fire safety experts contend that fire codes and other requirements would probably have made a difference. A fire code would have required frequent inspections by fire marshals who might have prohibited the plant's owner from storing the fertilizer just hundreds of feet from a school, a hospital, a railroad and other public buildings, they say. A fire code also would probably have mandated sprinklers and forbidden the storage of ammonium nitrate near combustible materials.

"It's tough to overstate the importance fire codes would have made," said Scott Harris, a former emergency management coordinator in Texas for the Environmental Protection Agency, who is now with UL Workplace Health and Safety, a safety science company. "Texas just hasn't wrapped its brain around this fact yet."

--> BECAUSE TEXANS HAVE NO BRAINS!! ...sheesh!

And this is the worst:

In chemical fires, firefighters often bear a heavy toll. Ten of the at least 14 people who died in West were firefighters, and two more were residents helping fight the flames. This week, officials from the state firefighters' association said the 50-foot-tall memorial to volunteers killed in the line of duty, on the Capitol grounds in Austin, had no room left for new names, not even those from West.

And ultimately, this sentiment runs deep down there:

"Businesses can come down here and do pretty much what they want to," said Mr. Burka, senior executive editor at Texas Monthly. "That is the Texas way."

Wow.

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