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With all the talk about welfare reform these days, it is surprising that no one has taken aim at one aspect of this destructive system that allows, even encourages, people to escape responsibility for their own actions.
And it doesn't help that the biased liberal media give sympathetic coverage to these people.
Consider the Buffalo Creek residents who have been criticizing the U.S. Forest Service for not instituting a fire ban earlier.
They live in secluded enclaves in Pike National Forest, and in their view, it is the job of the Forest Service to operate the forest as their sanitized preserve.
The problem is that you can postpone forest fires, but you cannot prevent them. And the longer you postpone the fire, the bigger the fire that finally comes.
Back in high-school biology, we learned about photosynthesis and the Krebs cycle. Trees and other plants apply sunshine to carbon dioxide. The oxygen returns to the atmosphere, and the carbon goes to build trunks and limbs.
To split carbon dioxide requires energy, energy that will be released when the carbon and oxygen reunite. That can happen slowly through normal decay. It can happen inside an animal that eats the plant matter. It can be postponed for milliions of years if the tree becomes coal.
And the stored energy can be liberated by combustion, and the more of that stuff you have lying around, the bigger and more dangerous the conflagration.
There are several ways to handle that situation. One is to haul out the combustible material by logging it, and then installing it as studs and joists in urban settings where it is easier to amass fire-fighting personnel and equipment.
Another is to allow frequent small fires in the woods, so that huge amounts of combustible material do not amass.
The political problem with logging is that many people in National Forest enclaves do not like the sounds of skidders, chain saws, heavy trucks, lumberjack cursing, etc.
The political problem with those little controlled
burns
is that they produce smoke, which interferes with
the fresh air, montain views, soaring vistas and other
phrases on the real-estate promotion brochure.
And so the Forest Service is pressured against either logging or small fires. The combustible stuff continues to amass, just waiting for a chance to burn. Eventually a spark hits it when the weather is hot, dry and windy.
Then it's time for public pretense. The pretense is that the fire never would have happened if five Lakewood teenagers had been more thorough in putting out a campfire, and so therefore those youngsters, their teachers, parents, heirs and assigns should be held totally responsible.
But in fact the Buffalo Creek fire would have happened sometime. The exact nature of ignition mechanism -- campfire, lightning, spark from a sagging trailer safety chain on a passing car -- is irrelevant. The extensive fire happened because combustible materials were allowed to accumulate, not because some teenagers went camping.
A couple of years ago, I proposed a reasonable compromise between the rights of property owners and the common desire for small and inexpensive governments.
I called it the Stupid Zone. Each county would have a map of avalanche paths, fire-prone areas, unstable hillsides, quickly-depleted aquifers, etc.
People who own property in the Stupid Zones could do whatever they wanted with their land. However, government would not subsidize their follies with fire protection, rescue, road maintenance, sheriff patrols, water trucks, etc.
But instead, we've got a welfare state for people who build inside Stupid Zones, like forests with huge accumulations of combustible material. We send out armies of people -- people who risk their lives -- to protect the houses in the Stupid Zones and to keep the fire from spreading into other Stupid Zones.
Nor is this unique to Colorado. It's a national problem. Want to build on an unstable beach, subject to erosion every time the waves get high? We've got federal insurance for you. Put up a city in a hurricane corridor? The feds will bail you out every time some candidate needs Florida's electoral votes. Or another city atop a seismic fault? Uncle Sam will come in and rebuild the freeways.
In other words, we use tax money to protect people from the predictable consequences of their own actions.
Political conservatives often claim that welfare destroys the moral fiber of poor people. They argue that if you're going to get a bigger check every month by having another baby, then why not be promiscuous and irresponsible?
But the same folks who want to overhaul our welfare system have been curiously silent about the Stupid Zones. If Uncle Sam has a duty to stop all forest fires, why should you exercise any intelligence or responsibility about where and how you build?
Doesn't that destroy people's moral character, too? Or do people of good moral character build in Stupid Zones, and then blame teenagers and the Forest Service for the consequences?
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