Regulations

Let's change FEMA’s (and similar disaster response agencies’) regulations as follows:

For example: if a person lives in a hurricane prone area and their house is destroyed by a hurricane (or related disaster such as a tornado or flooding caused by a hurricane), they can receive help to restore their lives to some semblance of order. However, they may not receive any more hurricane-related bailouts for the next 10 years.

Because right now we are subsidizing people who think it is a good idea to build their house in areas which are prone to natural disasters on a regular basis and everyone who does not live in such areas is paying for them to do so.

By removing the incentive which allows them to spread their risk among everyone else, we will begin the process of forcing people make truer assessments of the amount of risk they are willing to take on than they are currently doing.

The positive results? 

1. People will move away from areas prone to certain natural disasters or
2. Have to buy proper insurance to ameliorate the risk they are voluntarily taking.
3. Also cost to everyone else will go down as the government stops forcing them to pay for someone else’s willful disregard of reality.
4. "Worst-disaster ever" will be used less frequently as fewer people are at risk to harm.

1. Areas like South Florida would see a drop in population or
2. Their inhabitants would see a rise in the cost of living commensurate with the true risk they are taking to indulge their preference to live in the area.
   

The Left has a pretty consistent policy towards regulation: More, please; anytime, anywhere.  If there's a problem, it must be the job of government to regulate.

• NYTImes, 2001: "The union officials said they feared that Ms. Chao would adopt toothless, voluntary recommendations for American corporations that would fail to prevent the 1.8 million injuries estimated to be caused each year by repetitive motions."
• NYTimes, 2001: "But labor unions and many public- health advocates say federal regulations are needed because not all corporations can be trusted to protect workers."
• NYTImes, 2003: "Politicians score easy points by railing against big government and excessive federal regulations. But a three-part series in The Times this week by David Barstow and Lowell Bergman showed that workplace safety rules are in fact far too weak, and dramatically underenforced."

This must be those harmful consequences of deregulation.

The rate of workplace injuries and illnesses in private industry declined in 2007 for the sixth consecutive year, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today. Nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses reported by private industry employers declined from 4.4 cases per 100 workers in 2006 to 4.2 cases in 2007.

And since miners are often invoked as a symbol of workplace safety problems, the record on mine safety for the past few decades...