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Consequences for Our Actions Philip V. Brennan Last week I got the bill for the renewal of my homeowner's insurance policy. It sent me into a state of shock. Two years ago it was about $1,000, last year it doubled to $2,000.
This year it's $6,200!
I'm not alone in being hit with a huge premium. Just about every homeowner here in Florida is getting the same grim news when the bill for their homeowner's policy arrives. For many, especially young couples struggling to keep up with the cost of living on modest salaries and retirees living on fixed incomes, the cost rings a death knell for their current lifestyle.
They simply can't pay it; the mortgage holder forces them to carry insurance on their homes they can't possibly afford; and the result is . . . well they will either sell or be forced out.
Landlords will be forced to raise the rent to the point that few renters will be able to afford.
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The effect on the state's economy is going to be catastrophic. It will kill an already diminished real estate market. It will vastly increase the cost of living as stores and business owners are forced to pass on their increased insurance premiums to their customers, and it will drive displaced homeowners out of Florida.
As Floridians begin to grasp the implications of all of this, they are demanding that something . . . anything . . . be done about dealing with this catastrophe. But just what can be done?
The insurance companies have been hit by the cost of the incredible damage caused by series of destructive hurricanes and must be able to recover the enormous amounts of money they were forced to pay out in the wake of the five recent hurricanes that hit the state and also build up the reserves needed to cover future storm damage.
That can only do this by raising premiums to the point necessary to allow them to do business here.
There's not much the state of Florida can do.
They can't possibly subsidize the insurance companies or their policy holders without massive tax increases in a state without a state income tax. There's talk of a special session of the legislature to come up with some solution, but nobody seems to have the vaguest idea of what can be done. And as it becomes increasingly clear that the only way out is to grin and bear it — hardly a satisfactory solution for the hundreds of thousands of Floridians facing loss of home and hearth — public anger is going to flare.
Floridians are going to go looking for someone or something to blame for our dire situation, but the one place they won't look is at themselves. Like most of our fellow Americans, we have ceased to understand a simple fact of life — that there are always consequences to face as the result of everything we do.
We recoil from the law of consequence, and when we face any unpleasant results of something we have done, we refuse to admit that we had any part in it and go looking for somebody else to blame.
So what, you ask, have we Floridians done to bring on the consequences we now face as the aftermath of the massive hurricane damage the state has experienced over and over again.
Are we not merely the innocent victims of an act of nature. How can anyone blame us?
Well, it might be instructive to consider what brought on our dilemma to begin with. What did we do to create the situation we now face? Could it be that it is the result of something we have done?
A consequence of it?
Of course it is. The majority of us are here in Florida because of the subtropical climate that allows us to bask in the warm sunlight and balmy breezes while the rest of the nation is blanketed in snow or shivering in the icy cold. This is truly paradise — most of the time that is.
We chose to live here in order to enjoy the blessings of a unique and wonderful climate. But when you chose to live in the subtropics, you also chose to live in an area which hurricanes, like tourists, have proven they enjoy frequently visiting.
Florida, a peninsula sticking out in the warm waters of the Gulfstream and the tropical oceans is a favorite hurricane destination. In other words, suffering from the consequences of a hurricane is a consequence of our choice to live here.
We can't blame anybody else but ourselves, We just don't want to take the bad along with the good. We enjoy the benefits of life in the subtropics but recoil from accepting the downside - in this case frequent tropical disturbances such as hurricanes.
And we are not alone in this delusion that we can do whatever we want and be free of any consequences of our actions. Take our current situation vis-a-vis Iraq for example.
Although many dispute it, the war in Iraq is a part of the ongoing war on terror, a conflict forced on us by a resurgent Islamic jihad which is aimed at nothing less than world domination — a longstanding goal of the Islamic revolution dating back to the eighth century and one which the West has been forced to combat from time to time over the centuries.
We are at war in Iraq, and we are suffering from the natural consequences that arise out of fighting a war, any war, — a huge drain on our financial resources, a dislocation of our national priorities, and worst of all, the continuing deaths and maiming of the best and bravest among us — husbands, sons, and daughters serving on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We appear befuddled by the natural consequences that arise out of an armed conflict.
We act as if those consequences are somehow unique and not the expected result of fighting a war. It's as if we expect the nation's involvement in the war to be the only consequence-free war in history.
We want to be free to wallow in the pursuit of the things that really matter such as watching football, reading about celebrity weddings in Italian castles, and watching "Desperate Housewives." War is a distraction and we reject this war as being a consequence of our desire to remain free of terrorist attacks and domination by radical Islam.
Our badly constructed and ineptly administered social programs such as Social Security and Medicare are tottering on the brink of a catastrophe that must be addressed if they are to survive without massive tax increases yet we allow our politicians to dawdle and avoid doing what must be done to rescue them.
The present situation is a consequence of our refusal to accept the fact that such so-called safety net programs can only survive if based on financially sound actuarial principles and kept free of politics.
We don't want to admit that what's facing these programs is a disaster brought on by our refusal to recognize that there are consequences to be faced when you ignore reality.
In the end, we pay for what we do.
That's the way it is.
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s.
He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers.
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