8 thoughts on “Perspective”

  1. But, if productive people subsidize flood defence for lazy and undeserving (LU) people, not only LUs will not have an incentive to become more productive but, in the event of a natural disaster, most of them would survive, thus blocking the invisible hand of (social?) Darwinism.

    Nice to see a new post.

  2. Random Lurker misses your obvious point.

    We can all agree that $10 billion is far too much for the dead hand of the state to spend on storm surge barriers for many reasons, including RLs.

    So there is a market opportunity here for those with money to invest. I fully expect that, as the driving force behind today's economy, New York's wealth creators and job creators will innovate to produce individualized storm surge barriers that can be erected around single family homes, solving the flood problem and creating a new and vibrant market where there was not one before.

    1. According to the laws of economics, if there was a clear profit possibility, some rational actor would have had caught that possibility before.
      Hence, the absence of flood defences shows that it would be unrational (or unprofitable, but it's the same) to build some.
      That, or the market isn't rational, presumably because of some goodhearthed but ultimately silly government intervention, such as ome socialized form of flood prevention, that masks the real incentives to market partecipants.

    1. One trend over the course my life that surprises me is the complete loss of self-confidence on the part of the American middle class. Thirty years ago, if you asked members of the American middle class who created the wealth, they would have said "us". Now they say, "the rich". The idea that taxes the rich is necessarily expropriation only makes sense in an environment where people have lost the dignity of their own sense of self-worth.

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