Its a trick question, the US supports all big businesses in numerous ways. You dont get to be big without goverment help. So some become monopolies…
Which points to the irony of libertarianism - all these rich old white guys who want to not pay taxes, etc only got rich because of the government support. The US goverment created a system where you guys could make money and thrive. Thank the goverment, pay your dues and learn to care about others.
Yeah. One of the reasons hardly anyone buys earthquake insurance here is that we expect low cost loans to help rebuild if necessary. We are basically self-insuring given this. If I had bought earthquake insurance when I moved in, I think I would have spent well, well over $100K on it with no benefit so far. Given that my property is unlikely to vanish into the depths, it would have been a bad investment.
I agree. FEMA should be a governmental program directed to restoring the level of order and functioning needed so that the private sector can take over.
But, FEMA was providing nearly 2,000 trailers for people to live in (and ultimately just gave them away) up to four years after Hurricane Katrina. (This line: “At the beginning of June 2009, activists protested in Washington, D.C., to remind the government of the many Hurricane Katrina survivors still without re-built homes,” quite frankly calls to mind nothing so much as this cartoon.) Those kind of activities aren’t emergency response, that’s just a generalized welfare program.
“But they needed them!” I hear you say. No doubt. But if New Orleans suffers such extreme weather events that its citizens will need to rely on government provision of housing up to four years after the event, then definitely we cannot allow people to live there, right?
Tell all the people who own homes and businesses in and around NO that the risk is just too great and they should abandon their multibillion dollar investments. And move somewhere safer. At their own expense, natch. I can’t wait to see how well that flies. Freedom!
That’s not what I’m saying at all (and I suspect you know that). What is said is, “Live where you wish, but if there are risks associated with living there that you do not wish to bear on your own, you must either insure or live elsewhere. (Or bear the risk on your own, after all.)”
“Life should be all skittles and beer” and “No expense is too great for the public to pay to allow me to do what I want” are not a governing philosophy.
The people in the trailers didn’t have the resources to pick up and move. Those who did either rebuilt or did move.
Here is a solution. We in the Bay Area will move to Oklahoma to get away from earthquakes. Those in Oklahoma will move to New Orleans to get away from tornadoes. And those in New Orleans will move to the Bay Area to get away from hurricanes.
All better now, right?
After four years? Couldn’t even rustle up enough for a security deposit and a month’s rent? What the fuck were they doing over all that time?
Well, I suffered through a hurricane. Lifetime of free housing for me!
As I’ve already pointed out, this is a red herring. Yes, you’ll be pleased to know, I understand that there is no region of the country immune from natural disasters. So the fuck what?
Everybody’s gotta pay for food. Everybody’s gotta pay for clothing. We don’t say, “Well, since everybody has to buy food and clothing, let’s just have the government do it and distribute food and clothing to people.”
So maybe everybody’s gotta pay for insurance. It will be more expensive in some places (where there is a greater likelihood of natural disaster) and less in others. And no, it is not the case that every square inch of the earth’s surface is just as dangerous as any other.
In any event, you seem to think that this “Well, you can’t move away from the risk” is some great counter-argument. But I truly don’t know what you think it proves. I mean, what? “The world doesn’t work the way I want it to, so everybody’s gotta pay my insurance!”
Neither is “Suffer, scum! Mwahahahaha!”
And what you are resolutely igniting is that any place remotely livable is going to be prone to natural disasters. Some place geologically dead that never gets high winds or intense rains or fires is going to be a near-lifeless desert; the sort of place that has those cool balancing stones because nothing ever happens to knock them down.
OK, everybody has to buy insurance. I’m cool with that. It’s part of being a responsible homeowner.
Every homeowner is going to need plumbing work done at some point in their lives too. So, guess what, homeowners need to save money and keep some in reserve for plumbing emergency. Or have insurance or access to credit.
Oh, perhaps I’m just a heartless monster who doesn’t understand that saving money is hard and doesn’t understand the obvious truth that the government should provide everyone with free emergency plumbers.
Well, this is from the Libertarian Party’s web page (interesting, as always, that non-Libertarians answer the most and don’t bother to actually check to see what the real position of Libertarians is):
Granted, this is an old article, but it seems clear to me that the Libertarian Party’s position is far from the “Suffer, scum! Mwahahahaha!” strawman being portrayed. Instead of these ridiculous strawmen, does anyone have any actual cites showing the Libertarians are opposed to the federal government providing relief to disaster areas? Because it’s always been my understanding that both big and small ‘l’ Libertarians see this as one of the legitimate functions of the government TOO provide. But, fight my ignorance here and show me the money…instead of the straw.
[ b]Kimmy**, if you’re saying that the first settlers of the New World should have been more analytical in choosing the locations of their homesteads, I’ll offer that this is mooted by the events of several hundred intervening years. If you want to broaden this to the rest of the planet, then a few thousand years of more-or-less recorded history demonstrates that forcing this into a “personal choice of location” scenario is ridiculous.
If you mean that government supervised, reasonably regulated shared risk pools can be organized and sold as commercial products, and these will go a long way to mitigate personal losses in disasters, I’ll totally agree. If though you claim that such can function without government oversight, regulated only by contract law, I vehemently demure.
Finally, if you suggest that insurance alone, libertarian version or otherwise, can provide all of the relief needed after a genuine disaster, then your claims are pure foolishness.
I was going to ask that. Exactly where in Libertopia should everyone move in order to wisely avoid ever getting hit by a disaster?
I think you nailed where this whole conversation has gone off the rails. Federal disaster management isn’t supposed to be a substitute nor competitor for private insurance. It’s for providing a coordinated relief effort & temporary infrastructure for entire regions that have temporarily lost the comforts of civilization. I suppose you could say that your city or county or even region could purchase “disaster relief insurance” on behalf of the entire population, but if you say that, then you’ve accepted that government has a role here and you’re only dickering over the financing mechanism.
And that’s fine, but that’s not the discussion that I think I’ve seen up to this point.
“Oh boy Oh boy oh boy! I get to lose everything I own, including my family home, my pets, and my living, and instead I get to live in a cheap trailer and eat government cheese!” Do you think those people wanted this?
Everyone* does* pay for a little bit of horrible disaster insurance. It’s called “taxes”.
I don’t to abandon New Orleans or New York because someone who read that idiot Rand can whine about “freeloaders”.
I want to be able to pay a tiny bit more taxes- less than 1%- so that those who are unlucky can get back their lives and start contributing to society. I want there to be NO so that there’s more jazz and music and Mardi Gras and shipping (it’s a major port- the largest in the USA) . I think Tulare Univ is important. And so forth. Abandoning NO because they have a disaster every few decades is complete and utter foolishness.
Would you have us leave NYC too? LA? SF? :rolleyes:
You just don’t understand how insurance works- the larger the pool the safer and better for everyone. Pure economics.
It’s so amazing that the disciples of Rand not only have no idea of human decency and kindness, but even less grasp of simple econ 101.
In a word: yes. Yes, they preferred to have the government bear the cost of housing them, even if it was less than glamorous accommodations.
What possibly is your alternative explanation for the fact they were there four years later (2005-2009, which covers the three years our economy was firing on all cylinders, mind you)?
No, really, I want to know. Four years. And looking for more. Can’t have hated it that much. (While you’re lecturing me on Econ 101, why don’t you check out “revealed preferences.”)
As to the rest of your post, I’ve already said in this thread that I am fine with the government stepping and restoring order and functioning, at which point, private enterprise should take over.
I’m sure those trailers were just so luxurious. These people lost nearly everything, and they didn’t have that much to start with. Parts of New Orleans were and are very poor. You think they didn’t want to return to their neighborhoods?
I know, let’s forcibly resettle them. And make them walk to save money. We can call it Trail of Tears II, Electric Boogaloo.
Try to understand my point about contained risks versus very uncertain risks. Food and clothing are regular expenses, well contained. We don’t buy food insurance, but we do buy medical insurance to cover large unexpected personal expenses. However for the medical insurance company, the risk is quite well contained, and is no more an issue than our risk for buying food. Say statistically they can expect to pay $1,000 +/- $50 for each insured. They can charge $1100 and make a profit. (Ignoring administrative costs for the moment.)
The problem with hurricane and flood insurance is not that some places are more expensive than others - the ones that are not at risk don’t contain customers. It is that the insured has a bigger chance of losing. For medical insurance, I can expect to lose $100 per year on average, but that is worth it. (The insurance company charges at the high end of expected value, I value it right at expected value.) Since hurricanes are uncertain, the insurance company can expect to pay $1000 +/- $500 a year, and that is averaged over several years, some of which will have few events and some will have many. So the delta in value to the customer is much greater, and fewer take it, and the insurance company has to keep more reserves to deal with the disasters that do hit.
And while Florida might be dangerous, the Jersey Shore is not usually considered a high risk area. Nor is Far Rockaway. There can be a massive earthquake in the midWest still (the first earthquake I ever felt was in Urbana) - want to not provide federal aid in that case?
BTW, federally subsidized flood and earthquake insurance is not exactly free.
You don’t know much about New Orleans, do you? And while some of the country was doing fine, those people (and the middle classes) were not. The increasing wealth of the 1% during that time just didn’t seem to trickle down on them.
Ah, you probably think they spent all that time in the Superdome because they thought the Saints were about to play.
I just want to point out this was most excellent and made me LOL
As to flood insurance, this simply isn’t true. The whole reason the National Flood Insurance Program exists is because the risk-pooled cost of flood insurance in the private market was too expensive to allow expanded construction into beachfront and flood-plain areas. Back when Florida and the Gulf Coast were hillbilly wastelands, no one outside of the area much cared about these costs, but when they became desirable retirement and vacation destinations, people began to complain that the frequency of hurricane weather made the cost of insuring against flood damage prohibitively high.
The NFIP was set up to subsidize these costs. It offers flood insurance at premiums well below the actuarial cost. Taxpayers who do not have flood insurance (i.e., who are outside the risk pool) are on the hook to pay any cost of claims that exceed premiums paid. One can argue about whether or not this is a good policy idea, but it’s not just a bigger version of an ordinary insurance risk pool.
Every area of the country is subject to natural disasters, but insurance costs for various disasters differ because those disasters happen with different frequencies and cause different amounts of damages. Tornadoes are common, but the geographic scope of their damage is much more limited than that of a hurricane. Earthquakes strong enough to cause devastation on the scale of a hurricane happen far more rarely than hurricanes.
As to every other form of natural disaster, the risk-adjusted cost of insuring against those disasters is entirely built into the cost of living there. The earthquake insurance rider purchased by a person living near the Hayward fault covers the actuarial cost of insuring that home, and the only money that will be used to pay claims for damages under those policies is the money paid into the risk pool by other insureds over time. The same is true for tornadoes, wildfires, etc.
Flood insurance is qualitatively different because it is subsidized from outside. On the one hand, this is great because it preserves New Orleans, a cultural gem built below sea level next to a giant lake. On the other hand, it also means that taxpayers are subsidizing rich beach communities like Duck NC and Seaside FL, as well as casinos on the Mississippi coast.
Warning: I’m going to argue both sides of the fence. That’s partly because I don’t think it’s a simple “yes or no” question, and partly because regardless of “side” we should focus on good arguments, not bad ones.
I agree with this, and it’s one of the reasons I don’t call myself a libertarian.
However, they don’t address my specific point, which is you don’t have to live in a flood plane. When I bought a house, I looked into flood insurance. Know what? I couldn’t buy any. Why not? Because I was NOT in a flood plane where the government subsidized it. When I looked at the map for where it could be bought, gee … it was all those places that keep getting flooded during bad storms! So why is the government subsidizing people living where these hazards exist? Answer: because businessmen who wanted favors from Uncle Sam pushed through the legislation. I question whether that is good for the country.
Note that I acknowledge the counterargument, which is that we and the economy are all far better of with this subsidized insurance, so that shorelines can be developed, leading to for example the huge beach economy of the NC Outer Banks. I’m not convinced by that argument, but I think it deserves serious consideration.
I’m going by the federal map that defines where flood insurance is subsidized by the government, which is offically called a “flood plane” in the maps. If you live in one of these areas, you might not think you’re in a flood plane, but you run significant risk of flooding during a big storm.
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Libertarians would say “yes”. I would say that we shouldn’t have federally subsidized insurace for predictable risks, like flood plains, but that we should have FEMA for unpredictable ones.
Well put. Any attempt to say it’s all good or all bad is oversimplifying. My feeling is that the federal government should do less than it now does, but not abandon FEMA altogether.
Everyone take a deep breath and a step back. Libertarianism is about ideological purity, not real world solutions to things like natural disasters. It certainly isn’t about getting anybody elected to an office high enough to actually implement any Libertarian ideas. Threads like this one feed the Libertarian need to make condescending statements to the rabble, but serve no other purpose. Worrying about what would happen in Libertopia is on a par with worrying about what will happen if Frodo doesn’t succeed in destroying that ring.
Libertarians are the single most self-marginalizing political group in the US. Chill out.
