An interesting admission

... from two sources not easily dismissed as having a libertarian bias, namely, The New York Times and the Sierra Club: The article Post-Storm Cost May Force Many From Coast Life discusses the effect of more expensive flood insurance on low- and middle-income beach dwellers and includes the following:

“The irony is, if we allowed market forces to dictate at the coast, a lot of the development in the wrong places would never have gotten built,” said Jeffrey Tittel, director of the Sierra Club’s chapter in New Jersey. “But we didn’t. We subsidized that development with low insurance rates for decades. And we can’t afford to keep doing that. Should a person who lives in an apartment in Newark pay for someone’s beach house?”

We can argue over how ironic* that is, but the point remains that allowing government do-gooding to eliminate price signals has achieved the wrong result.

*Cue a certain song by Alanis.