OK, OK. So the Port of New Orleans is necessary to the economic well being of North America, if not Planet Earth. The city will be rebuilt to some degree. SWNID admits that all great cities are built where they are to take advantage of certain factors of location, ignoring others.
But how do we avoid reliving what just happened there?
Clever contrarian John Tierney has a suggestion nobly informed by history and economics, two helpful disciplines that are sadly opaque to many pundits. The problem, Tierney opines, was reliance on the federal government to do what privately funded insurance and locally financed government action should have taken care of. Ben Franklin got it right: organize a local fire department and sell private fire insurance. So now we must apply to water what we have applied to fire: build local infrastructure and make flood insurance the only means of protection, not FEMA largesse.
Read Tierney and marvel that such good sense came from the New York Times.
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