These members from hurricane-prone districts voted against Sandy relief

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Glad they didn't let their personal biases interfere with moral hazard.

Is this the moral hazard of people knowingly subordinating other people's real homes and livelihoods to the rigid diktats of a self-involved social theory invented by and for rich white landowners and spuriously applied to a representative government's allocation of the money it invented by fiat? Because that moral hazard was very much incurred, courtesy of these two gentlemen and sixty-five of their compadres.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Glad they didn't let their personal biases interfere with moral hazard.

Is this the moral hazard of people knowingly subordinating other people's real homes and livelihoods to the rigid diktats of a self-involved social theory invented by and for rich white landowners and spuriously applied to a representative government's allocation of the money it invented by fiat? Because that moral hazard was very much incurred, courtesy of these two gentlemen and sixty-five of their compadres.

Maybe if the federal government didn't subsidize flood insurance for places at high risk of having floods, people would be more reluctant to establish their homes in such dangerous areas?

Or maybe areas around river mouths and along seashores have always been densely populated and it's not some sort of nefarious government scheme that makes people want to live there. Or maybe, even if it was a scheme, we shouldn't punish (or refuse to help) these people for it after the fact, because we are not a civilization of antiheroes from nineties comic books.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Of course the situation looks much more clear-cut when examined from only one side of the equation. You neglect to mention that government cannot create wealth, and must fund its endeavors through either taxation, inflation, or credit. Any way you slice it, you must punish people who live nowhere near the areas struck by Hurricane Sandy in order to compensate those affected by the hurricane. If you prefer punishing wage earners in order to help primarily well-off individuals affected by the hurricane, then so be it.

I'm indeed unconcerned about 'punishing' people whose homes and businesses are physically intact in order to help people whose homes and businesses aren't, and would be even more so were the people in the latter group primarily poor. In fact, I think this is a fairly minimal expectation of people living in a society where one plays nicely with others.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Not that the poor live far from the shoreline, of course. All those rich beachfronts have a poor hinterland, usually long before the hills.

Yep. Anybody with any degree of actual familiarity with New York and New Jersey would know this.