Connor O'Keeffe on why many victims of LA wildfires were uninsured

Making matters worse, many of the homes destroyed last week were uninsured.  Progressives and establishment media outlets seized on this fact to blame climate change for driving insurance providers out of high-risk areas. 

This talking point is complete nonsense.  If the risk of natural disasters in an area people want to live in increases, that’s good for insurance companies.  It drives up the demand for their product.  It’s true that home insurance providers have been fleeing the areas affected by these fires—with one provider canceling thousands of policies in the Pacific Palisades in the last year alone.  But that’s not because of climate change, it’s because of government intervention.

[...]

When governments mess with insurance prices—either through subsidies, cheap public insurance, or price controls—the result is always the same. More people move to dangerous areas that are highly susceptible to natural disasters. 

In 1988, California passed a law that forced insurance prices down by 20 percent, banned providers from using forecasts of future risk to set prices, and subjected all future price increases to government oversight. With rates severely decoupled from risk, the state saw extensive development in some very fire-prone areas. Then, after an exceptionally bad fire year in 2017, insurance providers tried to get approval to raise premiums to account for the high level of risk across the state. The government said no. 

As a result, seven of the twelve largest home insurance providers pulled out of California. And that trend is continuing today. 

~ Connor O'Keeffe, "Climate Change Is Not the Cause of California’s 'Insurance Crisis'," Mises Wire, January 14, 2025

Connor O'Keeffe on the Trump election victory

Trump’s win represents another major and well-deserved repudiation of the Washington establishment. In 2016, Republican voters decisively rejected Jeb Bush—the establishment’s chosen GOP candidate—and sent Donald Trump to the White House on a refreshingly anti-establishment platform. 

While he largely governed like an establishment Republican in his first term, his occasionally anti-establishment rhetoric was enough to prompt a full-court press from the political class to first force him out of office and later to disqualify him from ever holding power again. In the realm of public opinion, the establishment’s chosen tactic was to label Trump a racist, misogynist, wanna-be fascist whose supporters back him simply because they hate everyone who isn’t straight, white, and male.

~ Connor O'Keeffe, "Why Trump's Victory Matters, and Why It Doesn't," Mises Wire, November 8, 2024

Connor O'Keeffe on pro-Palestinian student protests and cultural Marxism

The strategic ineptitude of these students can seem almost astounding until you remember what they are being taught at these schools.  Universities like Columbia have gone all in on identity politics and social justice.  A more accurate name would be trait-based collectivized justice.  The dominant historical narrative that permeates almost every department and class curriculum considers the world to mostly have been in balance until white, western Europeans decided to get rich by stealing and expropriating resources from the rest of the world.  Putting aside how economically and historically delusional that is, by framing history as a series of injustices committed by an entire identity group on other identity groups in their entirety, adherents conclude that justice can only be attained on a collective, group level. 

And so, when students see the horrific images and videos coming out of Gaza of mostly brown, mostly Muslim people being blown up, crushed, and starved by white-looking descendants of European immigrants, it seems to fit neatly into their learned worldview.  So even though, in this case, it leads most of them to the correct general conclusion, it shouldn’t be a surprise that an imprecise, historically flawed narrative leads to imprecise, strategically flawed activism.

~ Connor O'Keeffe, "What Campus Protesters and Their Critics Get Right and Wrong," Mises Wire, May 1, 2024