Houston

[henry quirk]

"I just have a real hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that they built a neighborhood inside a reservoir."

"Could we have less foresight?"

"Developers should pay for flood insurance for 20 years."

"There was an entire band of idiots involved there."

"All that capitalism, the wise and all-knowing system, and you'd figure they wouldn't build neighborhoods inside a reservoir. Unless.. capitalism.. doesn't.. give a shit about people??"

Capitalism (more accurately, an unrestricted market) works only if the folks involved are self-responsible (buyer, beware, do your own research!). Any one building or buying there obviously isn't. The failure, then, is not capitalism but the short-sighted irresponsibles who figured Murphy's Law only happens to the other guy, and when it does happen some one else will clean up the mess and set things right.

Capitalism (an unrestricted market) and libertarianism (self-reliance) can't work on the large scale if the bulk of people won't self-direct or -restrain.

And since it appears most folks nowadays won't self-direct or -restrain ('Stop me! I'm walkin' offa cliff!') is it any surprise when folks put down roots in a reservoir?

Bred the wildness out of a bloodline, domesticate it, train it to trust and rely and you get stupidity (that there's the result not of libertarian pragmatism, but of communitarian idealism...libertarians don't want 'utopia', but communitarians do).