The Power Of Nothing

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Obama Administration has a 69-point plan how the federal government can better respond to hurricanes in a time of global warming. The underlying premise is the federal government should do anything. The premise is wrong, it should do nothing

First, there is no Constitutional authority to spend money to rebuild people’s houses after natural disasters. Second, there is a perfectly viable alternative way to achieve the objective of not having to endlessly rebuild coastal areas.

If you built in a flood zone and get flooded, no federal money to rebuild. And if you do rebuilt, you must build on stilts, which is so expensive nobody will do it and without government guarantees, they couldn’t get property insurance anyway. Those who can afford to build will self-insure. Attrition will solve the problem of damaged buildings and the abandoned ground eventually will revert to coastal wetland barriers, at no federal cost at all.

Sometimes the right answer really is: do nothing.

Joe Doakes

But “doing nothing”, even when it’s the right thing (not) to do, creates no government union jobs.

2 thoughts on “The Power Of Nothing

  1. “Everyone said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp. I built it anyway. It sank into the swamp. So, I used the federal bail-out money to built another one. That sank into the swamp. I used the federal bail-out one to build a third one. That burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.”

    A Monty Python skit or Obama Administration policy? You decide.
    ..

  2. Nate, keep in mind that John Stossel’s swamp castle that he writes about (actually a hurricane intensity test building, I guess) was built in the 1980s or 1990s, so this is actually not an Obama policy originally–just one that he’s very happy to keep going, I guess.

    That said, Joe and John Stossel are both right that the correct thing to do is to stop subsidizing flood insurance and the rebuilding of flooded communities. People will make smart choices if they pay for the actual risk, by and large.

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