The Feds offer and we are willing to accept

John Stossel sends his apologies. He feels bad about letting the American people foot the bill to rebuild his beach house, with its view of the Atlantic Ocean, after it was damaged in 1984 by a storm.

Inexpensive insurance offered by the National Flood Insurance Program — and not from private insurers who have the smarts not to provide coverage to people who build along rivers and oceans — enabled the ABC News reporter to return his four-bedroom retreat to its former fabulous state after a two-day nor’easter swept away the first floor.

Americans, by way of that same government-subsidized insurance, paid for the house, and its contents, after a fish-choker of a storm dragged the whole thing out to sea New Year’s Eve 1994. Stossel told a Fort Worth audience during a Tuesday speech sponsored by the National Center for Policy Analysis and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he’s a reformed man, although it was difficult to tell whether that conversion came as a result of guilt over fleecing taxpayers or because he just didn’t want to hassle with rebuilding the house again. A 2004 article he wrote for Reason magazine sounds as if it was something less than an epiphany.

“I could have rebuilt the beach house and possibly ripped you taxpayers off again, but I’d had enough,” Stossel wrote in Confessions of a Welfare Queen. “I sold the land.”

Nanny State

The self-described libertarian used his story to illustrate how deeply dependent Americans have become on a Nanny State that they expect to make everything all better. People in the audience of primarily conservative business types nodded in agreement when Stossel criticized our “spendthrift government” for “funding wealthy people to build big houses in dangerous areas.”

All I could think was that’s precisely what Gov. Rick Perry wants to happen along the Texas Gulf Coast. Granted, not everyone who lost a house or a business in Hurricane Ike fits into the “wealthy” category. But the hard reality is that government, funded by taxpayers regardless of the level, makes it possible for people to build, and rebuild, and rebuild in an area with a history of devastating storms and a darn good chance that they’ll happen again.

The room at River Crest Country Club rippled with laughter when Stossel said comparing government spending to drunken sailors is unfair to drunken sailors, “because at least they spend their own money.”

He did not to repeat a line from his magazine piece, “I’m not proud that I took your money, but if the government is foolish enough to offer me a special deal, I’d be foolish not to take it.”

And so the government keeps offering special deals to people who keep taking them, and people are so conditioned to believe that government is the only answer to every woe that besets them — in part because the politicians keep saying they will protect the people from harm and insulate them from their own bad choices — that people don’t just expect but demand the special deals.

In the end, the values of self-reliance and consequences and free enterprise become the things of history books and iconoclasts.

History might help quiet some of the Chicken Littles in the media who keep screaming for the government to do something about an economy teetering at the abyss, but I doubt it. The Congressional Budget Office last week forecast that the jobless rate will top 9 percent in early 2010. Granted, not pleasant. But Stossel — who said it was nice to be in Texas where “conservatives have friends. I live in New York, where I have none” — provided some context for those numbers.

“We have a 7.2 percent unemployment rate today. It was 25 percent in the Depression,” he said. “It was 10.8 percent in 1982. ... And the Dow was at 860. “Are we so sensitive that we can’t take the booms and busts of the business cycle?” Stossel asked.

Unfunded liabilities

Sadly, he knows the answer. Yes, we are. While President Obama and congressional Democrats debate the size of the next multibillion-dollar stimulus package — without input from Republicans, according to House Minority Leader John Boehner — they apparently ignore the $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities the nation already faces, primarily for Social Security and Medicare. “Government can’t keep the promises it is making,” Stossel said. “It’s unsustainable, and yet there’s no talk of cutting.” What to do, what to do. “My guess is they will just print more money, and we’ll look like Zimbabwe,” Stossel said. “I hope you have gold or real estate.”

X Jill “J.R.” Labbe is deputy editorial page editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.