Lotus-eater

The regulations being suspended are environmental (which have nothing to do with cutting corners) and those dealing with the building code. Proposals to suspend building code regulations will have to go through several bureaucracies for review, including the Office of the State Fire Marshall. He also suggests that the state legislature "incentivize the incorporation of additional fire hardening measures into rebuilding efforts and enhancements of fire mitigation and fire response capacity within rebuilt areas." So I hardly expect them to go hog wild and be like Texas.

Waiving permitting regulations is good. The problem is with the price controls on insurance rates, which are worse with an elected insurance commissioner who buys votes by keeping rates artificially low.

Or allow people to bear and pay for the risks they take instead of behaving like an annoying nanny. There are many other things that are the result of people's choices (e.g., obesity, risky sex, etc.) that cost orders of magnitude more in terms of lives and money.

It's heartwarming to see people having compassion for those who can afford to pay $30,000 per month for rent, and in fact the houses in many of the affected areas were valued at least double the national median of around $400K. One person's mobile home in Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates was worth $850K. The rents for lots there are only $800-$1400 per month and residents are concerned that the landlord will charge much higher rents or convert it into something else, which the landlord should do regardless because only very rich people can properly afford the risk of living there. Temporary assistance is all well and good, but sanctimonious invocations of conscience (which is a peculiarly Judeo-Christian concept) don't change the laws of supply and demand. Higher prices are an incentive to consume less and produce more. It would be better to give people cash to help them pay for more expensive housing or move away from SoCal entirely.

"Nobody likes “price gouging,” but choices are always between alternatives. How else but higher prices are we going to decide who gets the short supply? The alternative to rationing by price is rationing by waiting in line, or by political preference. Or by who you know. Paying higher prices is a reduction in your real income, and nobody likes that. But with less to go around, our collective real income is lower, no matter what the government does about it. The government can only transfer resources, not create them. And all the fixes to price gouging make the shortage worse, by discouraging people to cut back on demand or bring in new supplies. Yet the cultural and moral disapproval of price gouging is strong. Going back thousands of years, people (and theologians) have felt that charging more than whatever they had gotten accustomed to is immoral, especially if the merchant happened to have an inventory purchased in an earlier time. This “just price” moral feeling surely motivates a lot of the anti price-gouging campaign. Economics has only understood how virtuous price gouging is in the last 250 years" (The Grumpy Economist)

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