But I like the water....

Everyone loves water--sounds, sights, and of course, swimming in it! In fact, we love water so much, we build right up next to streams, creeks, and rivers--right in the floodplains. This is common both in cities, suburbs, and the countryside. Cities eventually decided to put most streams into pipes and culverts though, so half the time, we don't even realize where the streams are, or should be naturally.

It's ok to like water, to enjoy it--but we have to realize the limits to our actions. Floodplains are critical for stream/river health. They help relieve the river of excess flows (or floodwaters), and the riparian buffers associated with the floodplain help filter pollutants, regulate stream temperature, and allow for an increase in biodiversity. If we let floodplains and appropriate riparian buffers be, we would largely be ok.

The problem though, is that because we do build in floodplains and remove riparian buffers, and we remove the ability of streams and rivers to perform natural functions (which they do free of charge), we require more economic input the mediate all the problems that occur because of our previous decisions. Furthermore, insurance for everyone is affected. If you have home insurance, and the insurer also insures people in who live in floodplains, you are at an ever-increasing risk of having your rates go up due to those other folks. Makes very little sense, right? Build in floodplains, remove natural functions, then get paid back on someone else's dime for having your home destroyed by a flood...

The other possible insurance scenario is that the government, or government programs (such as FEMA), insure construction in floodplains, knowing well that they will eventually flood. Of course, we all know by now that tax dollars are used for any government programs, and that is no different here--YOUR tax dollars insure wasteful building in floodplains.

In the end, this all comes down to poor economic logic--deregulation and an entirely free market is not the way to go. Regulations, if written well, are meant to prevent wasteful spending, particularly wasteful tax dollar spending. Without regulations, Appalachia would be gone, our waters would still be polluted like in the mid 1900s, more people would be dying from cancer, we'd have polluted our earth much worse, etc. And ultimately, all that means more expenses that were unnecessary if problems were dealt with from the beginning.