Economic reality slaps business owners of New Orleans like a cold, 30lb mackerel upside the head...Thousands of business owners in the flood zone have been stunned to learn, long after the storm, how soaring rates for commercial wind coverage translate into fine print on their insurance policies.
Stunned? Let me get this straight, you choose to live in a cereal bowl, below sea-level, between the ocean, a lake, and a swamp, from which even rain water has to be pumped, in hurricane alley, and you just got destroyed by the biggest hurricane ever, and you are stunned, stunned, to learn that your insurance rates have gone up? Let me guess, you want the government to step in and cover all future hurricane losses because of what a tragedy it would be for America to lose the city's architecture, culture, and humanity because they are uninsurable?
Sorry, as a taxpayer, I don't think the government should be in the business of guaranteeing private ventures, even if that private venture is an entire city. That's a free-market function. If the rates are too high, you have choices: go somewhere else to set up shop, risk not having hurricane insurance, set up a private-business collective through which the group secures lower rates. Nobody else in America is guaranteed low insurance rates for private property coverage by the taxpayers, why should the residents of NO expect to be?
3 comments:
Ed, you just can't leave these people alone can you? You have regularly criticized the homeless Katrina refugees almost since day one after the tragedy. Now you jump on the business owners? I thought you were a free-market capitalist. I think the nation has an interest in preserving the city of New Orleans and America's taxpayers should pony up.
I put up a bird feeder on my deck. I filled it full and within a matter of days I had lots of birds. Then the problems started. Birds built nests all over the place. They started sqawking all the time demanding the food to be refilled, then there was the poop. Everywhere! I couldn't go out to clean it up for being dive bombed by birds thinking I was trying to take their food. I couldn't even fill the feeder without a potential altercation. So I quit. Soon the birds left to find another free food paradise. I cleaned up my deck and all was back to serenity and peace.
This story not only paralells here, but also with our illegal immigration issue. Just thought you folks might like to know.
Excellent analogy.
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