Yeah, but the problem is similar to the "subverting natural selection" argument against health insurance. You're not just accepting historical accident, you're

Yeah, but the problem is similar to the "subverting natural selection" argument against health insurance. You're not just accepting historical accident, you're actively taking away the incentives for acting sanely. I can understand the historical imperative, but that's not all you're doing by switching the costs to the government : you're changing the incentives for individuals. The short-term advantages of locating in a specific location (including short-term savings of not securing against acts of God at all) are allocated to individuals, the costs are carried by the whole. In this case that means building a lot of houses that will predictably suffer massive damage due to floods and/or other "acts of God" that are actually reasonably predictable (when may be unpredictable, but you the odds are 1000:1 that it will happen at some point in the next, say, 10 years). In the health care that means having habits that are will predictably lead to health problems (take your pick what you consider worse: expensive health problems or fatal health problems or health problems that are likely to spread). Whether we're talking eating fat, smoking, carelessness around animals, not cleaning living places or promiscuity : all will result in steadily building likelihood of serious health consequences. The issue is that this leads to an exponentially rising cost (you can prove that given reasonable assumptions the consequences' cost and seriousness will rise along with population size or faster), even in the face of efficiency improvements. This is because exponentially rising costs versus exponentially diminishing efficiency improvements : there is no question which will win, there's only a question of when. The problem is that in the short term efficiency improvements are likely to win, which is then of course used as an argument to state "see ? We can handle it". The truth is, obviously, that there is no way to handle the exponential rise that doesn't violate the laws of physics. So the real question is : Why build systems that common sense says : 1) must fail, no matter how many resources are comitted to make them work 2) are very likely to cause enormous damage just before they fail completely