How The Feds Blocked Effective Flood Insurance

As the floodwaters brought by Hurricane Harvey last week recede and new hurricane Irma moves slowly toward the Eastern U.S., it might be edifying to review how millions of Americans, despite federal anti-flood efforts, came to live and work in hazardous to dangerous flood-prone areas.

The foundation of the current disaster traces back at least to the late 1920s under Republican interventionist Herbert Hoover. In 1927, a very destructive flood occurred along the Mississippi River. Secretary of Commerce Hoover’s relief campaign greatly increased the power of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to implement supposed flood protection. 

No doubt, the Flood Control Act of 1928 helped construct what was considered one of the most impressive systems of levees in the world along the Mississippi River. However, the one thing it did not do was control flooding. While the new levee system prevented flooding in some areas, it quickened the natural current of the river which helped produce flooding in other areas. Other unforeseen consequences were the reductions in natural soil deposits and natural flow of water into the river"s flood plains.

Less than a decade later, another damaging flood in New England helped drive the passage of the National Flood Control Act of 1936. This Act was a real turning point in terms of centralization. Besides doubling the size of the federal flood-control program, it signaled that Congress would no longer merely provide occasional flood relief and regard floods as principally a local matter. It effectively enlisted the federal government and Army Corps of Engineers in the battle against floods.

For the rest of the 1930s and 1940s, private insurance markets were undermined because the Army Corps of Engineers built hundred-year flood walls which reduced risk just enough for homeowners to make private flood insurance too costly. On the other hand, private insurers saw these walls as insufficient protection which did not reduce risk enough. Regardless, an impasse was created for private markets that was both figuratively and literally cemented in place by the Army Corps.

Enter the New Deal central planners of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1953. TVA began monitoring flood-prone areas in and around one hundred and fifty towns and cities in its jurisdiction. At first, TVA used a worst-case standard from the Army Corps, regardless of whether such a flood had ever actually occurred.

This stringent standard was quickly abandoned when it was realized that it would eliminate huge areas of potential development that not only local private and public planners wanted, but TVA as well since part of its conflicted mission was spurring development. Thus TVA adopted a new standard skewed in favor of development that was based on past floods that occurred inside a 60- or 100-mile zone from proposed development.

Outside TVA’s jurisdiction, the U.S. Geological Survey and Army Corps of Engineers mapped flood plains with roughly the same backward-looking standard. By the end of the 1960s, all three agencies had laid the groundwork for a national map of floodplains. A very bad standard had been created.

Of course no tapestry of disastrous policies would be complete without a contribution by Lyndon Baines Johnson, thus the Southeast Hurricane Disaster Relief Act of 1965. This Act authorized $500 million in spending to assist in repairing damage created by Hurricane Betsy.

Next came the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, which created the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which covered up to $250,000 in damage to single-family houses and buildings in cities and towns meeting the flawed federal flood-plain criteria.

The absolute death knell for any semblance of economic and actuarial soundness in the NFIP came in 1973, when Congress allowed coverage to be extended to property owners who should have enrolled in the program and paid for insurance but did not.

While none of this is to say that had more rigorous private standards prevailed and the Army Corps and TVA never been created, that no one"s residence or workplace would ever have flooded.

However, there"s no doubt that the federal government"s perverse subsidization of residential and commercial development in flood-prone areas as well as artificially cheap flood insurance completely detached from risk assessment have contributed to not only the untold loss of billions of dollars of property, but lives as well.

Less Government. More Freedom.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

What would America look like today if the dream of our Founding Fathers of a limited central government had actually been realized? We have become so accustomed to big government that many of us simply assume that this is the only way that things can be done. But the truth is that things don’t have to be this way. We can have the kind of very limited federal government that our forefathers originally intended, but it is going to take a great deal of education and an enormous amount of political engagement in order to get there. On this Memorial Day, we will remember those that have died for our country, but let it also be a call to action. In every generation, Americans have had to stand up to defend the cause of liberty and freedom, and it will be no different in our generation. Just like during the Revolutionary War, there is no guarantee that we will be able to save America from the forces that are trying to destroy it, but if we sit back and do nothing they will win by default.

Just because there is no war to fight does not mean that the threat that we are facing is any less serious than what other generations of Americans have had to face. Over the last several decades, the U.S. Constitution has essentially been shredded, and at this point our republic is basically hanging by a thread. If we surrender to the left in this generation, the country that our forefathers envisioned may be gone for good.

Today I would like to share with you an excerpt from my upcoming book. It will be released about halfway through 2017, and when it is out you will be able to find it on my author page. As you will see, limited government is something that I am quite passionate about…

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“Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.” (George Washington)

Big government tends to suck the life out of everything. If you doubt this, just look around the globe. In nations where a central government dominates every aspect of society, the people seem quite lifeless. Of course an extreme example of this is North Korea. Their entire culture is centered around a philosophy known as “Juche”, and in this philosophy the “leader” essentially becomes an object of worship. Literally everything in North Korea revolves around the state and the “leader”, and as a result most of the population resembles a horde of mindless zombies.

On the other hand, the most dynamic societies throughout human history have always been the ones where people have had a tremendous amount of freedom to express their passions and creativity. There is a reason why we saw an unprecedented explosion of remarkable inventions in early America, and there is a reason why so many millions of immigrants have risked their lives to get here. Liberty has always been such a rare commodity in our world, and almost all governments eventually become tyrannical. That is why it is so imperative that we defend the liberty that we still have in this nation.

Our Founding Fathers envisioned a country where freedom and liberty would be maximized. Of course there always must be some sort of government, because otherwise you would have total anarchy. We want potential thieves and murderers to be frightened of the power of the law, and we are thankful for those that protect us from them. But way too often it is government that becomes the greatest threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that is the sort of tyranny that we desperately wish to avoid.

Today, there are literally hundreds of thousands of statutes, rules and regulations on the federal level, and when you throw in the state and local levels you get a total that is in the millions. Virtually every aspect of our lives is very tightly regulated and controlled these days, and this has been going on for so long that most people have begun to accept it as normal.

But the way our society works today is definitely not “normal”. Let me share with you an example from the state of California that makes my blood boil. If you can believe it, government officials actually fined one farmer 2.8 million dollars for plowing his own field…

The California farmer who became the poster child for EPA reform under President Donald Trump is being fined $2.8 million by state and federal regulators for plowing his own field in Tehama County.

According to a story in the Redding Record Searchlight:

“The case is the first time that we’re aware of that says you need to get a (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) permit to plow to grow crops,” said Anthony Francois, an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation.

“We’re not going to produce much food under those kinds of regulations,” he said.

However, U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller agreed with the Army Corps in a judgment issued in June 2016. A penalty trial, in which the U.S. Attorney’s Office asks for $2.8 million in civil penalties, is set for August.

In early America, they would have howled with laughter if someone would have suggested that farmers should be required to get permission from the government in order to plow a field and grow food.

This is just one example that shows why I am proposing that the Environmental Protection Agency should be completely shut down. I am very much in favor of protecting the environment, but I believe that the citizens of each state should decide how their own natural resources are managed.

And at this point it has become exceedingly clear that the EPA is wildly out of control. Prior to the Trump administration, the EPA had been operating under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama for 16 of the previous 24 years, and it is absolutely packed with radical leftists that are obsessed with promoting their own political agendas. Instead of trying to fire everyone, the easiest thing would be to just end the agency and start completely over.

If you are not with me yet, perhaps another outrageous example will persuade you. The following comes from Fox News…

A Wyoming man threatened with $16 million in fines over the building of a stock pond reached a settlement with the Environment Protection Agency, allowing him to keep the pond without a federal permit or hefty fine.

Andy Johnson, of Fort Bridger, Wyoming obtained a state permit before building the stock pond in 2012 on his sprawling nine-acre farm for a small herd of livestock.

Not long after contruction, the EPA threatened Johnson with civil and criminal penalties – including the threat of a $37,500-a-day fine — claiming he needed the agency’s permission before building the 40-by-300 foot pond, which is filled by a natural stream.

(http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/10/wyoming-welder-facing-16m-in-fines-beats-epa-in-battle-over-stock-pond.html)

Could you imagine being threatened with 16 million dollars in fines for constructing a pond on your own property?

This isn’t how America is supposed to operate.

I really don’t understand how we can still claim to be “the land of the free” when we allow leftist control freaks to dominate our lives down to the minutest detail.

The left always wants government to become bigger and bigger and to get more and more control. They want a government that is going to guide them safely through life and that will give them everything that they need. But every time government grows, liberty and freedom are diminished.

Yes, liberty and freedom can be dangerous and messy sometimes. But living free sure beats being told what to do every single moment of every single day.

One of the things that greatly troubles me is that progressives almost completely dominate our system of public education. Our public schools have now become liberal indoctrination centers, and survey after survey has shown that each successive generation has moved to the left compared to the preceding generation.

That is why it is so imperative that we end federal interference in education and return control of our schools back to the local level. I would shut down the Department of Education and I would cut off every penny of funding for Common Core.

Even though we spend far more on education than anyone else in the world, we are producing absolutely disastrous results. The following comes from a CBS News report…

Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency.

Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). The results were even worse for numeracy, with almost two-thirds of American Millennials failing to meet the minimum standard for understanding and working with numbers.

That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries.

(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/americas-millennials-well-educated-but-unskilled/)

Our public schools are failing badly, and we need to get them fixed. But we also need to greatly support parents that are pursuing other educational avenues such as homeschooling and private schools. At this point I completely understand why any parent would want to keep their kids out of our horrific public schools, and ultimately our entire system of education needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up.

Big government sucks the life out of the economy as well. Over the past ten years, the U.S. economy has grown at an average yearly rate of just 1.33 percent, and the only other era in U.S. history when economic growth was so bad was during the 1930s.

The business community is being absolutely strangled by rules, regulations, red tape and excessive taxes, but the Democrats always want to pile on more. Big corporations can hire lots of people to comply with all of the demands that government places on them, but small businesses and entrepreneurs are rapidly becoming an endangered species.

Today, there are less Americans that are self-employed than there were 27 years ago. In April 1990, 8.7 million Americans worked for themselves, but in April 2017 only 8.4 million Americans were working for themselves.

That may not sound that bad until you realize how much our population grew over that time frame. In 1990, the population of the United States was 249 million, but today the population is 321 million.

So the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has gone way, way down.

The solution is to get the government off of our backs. The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was between the Civil War and 1913. During this era there was no income tax, no IRS and no Federal Reserve. Many on the left would consider that to be a recipe for disaster, but instead there was an explosion of innovation and industry that was absolutely unprecedented. The following is how Wikipedia describes the economic conditions during this period of time…

In the last third of the 19th century the United States entered a phase of rapid economic growth which doubled per capita income over the period. By 1895, the USA leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output.^[175] For the first time, exports of machinery and consumer goods became important. For example, Standard Oil led the way in exporting kerosene; Russia was its main rival in international trade.^[176]Singer Corporation led the way in developing a global marketing strategy for its sewing machines.^[177]

The greatly expanded railroad network, using inexpensive steel rails produced by new steel making processes, dramatically lowered transportation cost to areas without access to navigable waterways. Low freight rates allowed large manufacturing facilities with great economies of scale. Machinery became a large industry and many types of machines were developed. Businesses were able to operate over wide areas and chain stores arose. Mail order companies started operating.^[119]Rural Free Delivery began being implemented in the early 1890s, but it was not widely implemented for a decade.^[178]

Companies created a new management systems to carry out their operations on a large scale. Companies integrated processes to eliminate unnecessary steps and to eliminate middlemen.^[119]

An explosion of new discoveries and inventions took place, a process called the Second Industrial Revolution. The electric light, telephone, steam turbine, internal combustion engine, automobile, phonograph, typewriter and tabulating machine were some of the many inventions of the period. New processes for making steel and chemicals such as dyes and explosives were invented. The pneumatic tire, improved ball bearings, machine tools and newly developed metal stamping techniques enabled the large scale production of bicycles in the 1890s. Another significant development was the widespread introduction of electric street railways (trams, trolleys or streetcars) in the 1890s.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United_States#Late_19th_century)

But the progressives couldn’t leave a good thing alone, and in 1913 the Federal Reserve was established and a federal income tax was instituted.

Since that time there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions, and now we are entering another one.

We are always asking our politicians to “fix the economy”, but the truth is that the best thing that they can do is to get out of the way.

If you take the shackles off, free enterprise works exceptionally well.

Those that follow my work on a regular basis already know that I believe that the Federal Reserve should be shut down, that the IRS should be phased out, and that the federal income tax should be reduced as much as possible with the eventual goal of eliminating it completely.

It has been said that nothing is inevitable except for death and taxes, but there is nothing that says that we must have an income tax.

We have had an income tax for so long that most people could not imagine life without one. But the United States absolutely thrived without one during the decades prior to 1913, and today states such as Texas and Florida are doing quite nicely without a state income tax.

There are lots of other ways to fund the government that do not involve an income tax. And actually only 46.2 percent of all federal revenue is brought in through taxing individual incomes. If we cut the size of government in half, we might even have some money to spare.

Of course considering the fact that we are 20 trillion dollars in debt, the truth is that we don’t have a single penny to spare, but I think that you get my point.

I just hope that you are able to see that life is generally better when government is reduced to the proper size and scope.

We should be able to say what we want to say without fear of retribution.

We should be able to live out our convictions and worship as we please.

We should be able to protect our own homes and do what we want with our own property.

We should be able to raise our own children and make our own health decisions.

We should be able to be free from the fear that the government is watching, tracking and monitoring all of our electronic communications.

In every human heart there is a hunger to live free, and big government is the enemy of freedom.

The dreams that our forefathers once had for this nation may have faded, but they aren’t dead just yet.

A new generation of patriots is rising, and we are determined to take our country back.