The difficulty with saying “just don’t live in a flood zone, and if you do, that’s your problem” is that as a civilization we’re rather dependent upon waterways and oceans for things like commerce and food. There’s a need to populate places that would otherwise probably be seen as objectively dumb to live in, because those areas are the ones best suited to providing access to said waterways and oceans. Thus, there’s a national interest in ensuring that it’s affordable to live in those places, which comes with some degree of subsidization for flood insurance premiums.
I think the better discussion to have is over the way we’ve handled infrastructure, environmental degradation, and urban/suburban sprawl in hurricane-prone areas over the past 70 years, and learning some hard lessons about willfully ignoring the scientific data on climate change. If we’re going to have people living in places that are objectively super risky, we should at least do what we can to mitigate that risk on a pre-emptive basis, not just pay to rebuild people’s houses in the aftermath.
