Opinion: Lessons learned by fire
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The Malibu brushfire has passed into history, leaving the seaside paradise poorer by five multimillion-dollar homes and Suzanne Somers with another trauma to add to her famously hard-knock life. I say without irony that I’m a fan of Somers, who in my view is a great entrepreneur, patriot and bouncer-back from personal hardships (real hardships too, not just tabloid hardships). So I’m willing to offer one bit of advice in reply to the official statement she issued after surveying the ruins of her beach house:
‘My nature is to look at the glass half full,’ Somers said, reading from a piece of paper. ‘I haven’t lost a loved one. We will rebuild, and I truly believe we will learn something great from this experience.’
Here’s something great the star might learn from this experience: Don’t rebuild! I don’t pretend to be immune to the charms of a Malibu beach house, but building a house in Malibu is in and of itself risky behavior. More to the point, as Matt Welch demonstrated a few years ago in this story about the California FAIR plan—which was established in 1968 ‘to provide basic property insurance to property owners who are unable to obtain it in the normal market’—means you and I are helping to subsidize that behavior.
In his famous, hilarious takedown of subsidized insurance, John Stossel gave a brief description of the inevitable results:
The insurance, of course, has encouraged more people to build on the edges of rivers and oceans. The National Flood Insurance Program is currently the biggest property insurance writer in the United States, putting taxpayers on the hook for more than $640 billion in property. Subsidized insurance goes to movie stars in Malibu, to rich people in Kennebunkport (where the Bush family has its vacation compound), to rich people in Hyannis (where the Kennedy family has its), and to all sorts of people like me who ought to be paying our own way.
Stossel was referring to federal insurance programs, but in the case of FAIR, we don’t need to look to Washington. Maybe at some level Suzanne Somers deserves our support for all the joy she’s brought to the Golden State. But paying her and other Malibuites to rebuild piles of kindling is a strange way to show our gratitude.