Earthquakes in British Columbia!!!

Would you ever live in an earthquake zone?

Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, Tofino?

Goddamn, a tsunami in Tofino and you're done.

Drowning is one of the worst ways to go.

But let’s say you survived.

Or let’s say you lived safely inland, away from the Pacific Ring of Fire.

You’d still suffer from the hands of government.


The C.D. Howe Institute is warning about this.

Funnily enough, they don’t see the massive fallout as a boom to the economy.

They’re saying a $35-billion insurance pay-out would cripple the industry.

We’re talking “systemic financial impact.” Forget any government bailouts.

There’s nothing “we” can do collectively that can’t already be done individually.

A major earthquake off the West Cost would be one of the craziest things to happen in our lifetime.

And there’s a 30 percent chance of it happening in 50 years.

That sounds better than some lotteries.

And since this whole fucking country is one giant artificial construct, where Western wealth gets funnelled back to the Laurentian elite, that is, the Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa corridor, a massive earthquake would financially impact the whole country.

And 45 percent of homeowners in Vancouver don’t even have quake insurance.

Most mortgages, including those backed by the unshakeable Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (see what I did there), aren’t covered at all.

The Property and Casualty Insurance Compensation Corporation (PACICC) says, like the 2008 financial crisis, a catastrophic earthquake is serious and inevitable.

According to them, and the C.D. Howe Institute, Canada’s economic players aren’t ready for the Big One.

So what’s the best course of action?

How would a libertarian society deal with this problem? Why would that be better than the statist quo?

Would private generosity from less affected areas really be superior to a burdensome tax regime that funnels from one group to another?

What if people in the rest of the country give a voluntary fuck you to British Columbia?

The C.D. Howe report says the government should raise awareness.

They advise people to buy insurance.

And as for the insurance companies, will they go bankrupt? … what can I say?

If anyone is to blame, it's the central bank for undermining the market order.

Democratic governments also legislate petty tyranny and wage war with anybody and everybody, no matter how violent.

In the long-term view of things, potential earthquakes, like undermining free markets, take a backseat to short-term interests.

Yet, the long-term thinking free market is the guarantee we'd need to get through this crisis.

Democracy is by far the dumbest political system ever devised by man.

What can you expect? We’re hunter-gatherers adapting to a complex market order few of us understand.

But even praxeological knowledge won't excuse us from an inevitable death.

Whether it's old age, cancer, an earthquake, or at the hand of government (and maybe indirectly, say, through the universal health care system), we'll all going to die.

But in the meantime, you own yourself. Even if you interpret that as mere self-control.

So get out of dodge if the thought of an earthquake scares you.

We still all suffer from the hands of government.

And they will fuck up any disaster response. Just look at what happened with Hurricane Katrina.

That wasn't Bush's fault, per se, but the inevitable result of bureaucracy overriding markets.