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Comment by survirtual | Hacker News Reader

How much of other people's tax dollars do you expect to spend to safeguard the bad purchases of land (soon to be water) owners?

Rising sea levels aren't new, it's ancient. Buying coastal properties always carries risk.

Society at large should not have to keep bailing out people who make poor decisions like this.

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> Rising sea levels aren't new, it's ancient. Buying coastal properties always carries risk.

40% of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast[1]. If one person makes a bad purchase of land, the problem is theirs. If 3 billion people make bad purchases of land, that's a problem for everyone in the world.

Probably we can't blame most of those people for much beyond being born where they were.

[1] https://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/natlinfo/indicators/methodolo...

>>Society at large should not have to keep bailing out people who make poor decisions like this.

I get your point, and I agree to a certain extent, but do you apply this same approach to other bad decisions such as EG overeating causing obesity, drug taking etc?

I'm honestly not sure which point you're making in this thread. Are you saying that government should somehow make people whole for the loss of their coastal property? Or are you making the point that the government has no business interfering with the property rights of others? There seems to be a tension here, because I don't see how you could do the latter without also doing the latter — i.e., making coastal property owners whole requires taking someone else's property (either money or real property) and giving it to them. Or maybe you'd propose that we resettle them onto federal lands? (Even in that case, taxpayers bear a significant opportunity cost.)

My original point was that it is easy for people to advocate for the government to take people's property away, when they have no property of their own or no skin in the game.

My other point was just a wider one on moral hazard, and if it applies to coastal property (in that people bear their own costs) should it apply to EG obesity (where people should bear the cost of healthcare issues). If not, why is property a separate case?

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