A very large percentage of the misconceptions about economic policy would go away if people could close their eyes and momentarily forget about pieces of paper like banknotes and insurance contracts. Economic policy is about maximizing useful goods and services, not manipulating pieces of paper. (I’m not deprecating such paper, just espousing certain thought experiments.)
Flood control presents a good example. The goal of farmers (and society) should be to prevent the floods (quite doable with properly managed dams and reservoirs); yet attention in this thread is focused on the pieces of paper that move flood losses from one entity to another. :smack:
It is easy to understand why libertarians are unwilling to consider flood control seriously. If they reasoned the problem out step-by-step they’d gradually reinvent a representative democracy with taxation powers that would hire experts.
Instead their dogma will lead them to a silly system with private companies competing to build little dams, and in their “perfect free market” farmers will “vote with their feet” by moving away from the paths of the dams built by the companies whose dam broke a decade ago, killing thousands.
The extreme libertarian model is so silly, I’ve got to wonder if you guys are just trolls testing Poe’s Law.