some of these innovative strategies that s not our decision to make but it should be up to the local people. dagen: adrian these areas will be redeveloped and they will continue to grow more than 2% of this country s jobs are now in the houston area and it s a vital cog in our growing dominant energy business. no of course. i mean look rebuilding houston there s no question that has to happen. millions of people have been displaced and this is where they lived for years and years, but moving forward this is a prime example of why zoning is so important, why urban planning is so important and why limiting government from doing that to some extent caused a lot of harm to these people. many of them obviously had no understanding of how zoning works and all of a sudden they realize that there s a lot of concrete in houston and it can t absorb all this water so moving forward zoning is incredibly important and this is a prime example of why it is. dagen: and jonas, people always live
get water not just the people that happen to live closest to the supermarkets. dagen: adrian i m glad i m not near gary b, because he s going to get struck by lightning i m with you, that is a very unpopular position. i mean again, these people have suffered so much can you imagine places like beaumont where you can t get any water right now, the water system is not working you go to the grocery store and try to buy a case of water and it s $90? unacceptable. dagen: it s called bad karma, jonas? well there won t be any water if it s $90. that s the point gary is trip ping to make. they do price gouging crack down s is venezuela where you can t get food or anything because they don t allow the prices to reflect shortages. look if you want to be like a soviet union and have fixed prices after a storm that s fine you ll have lines and shortages but we ll all feel good about it dagen: here is what happens. where you let the prices reflect market demand. dagen: final word but
but what do you say? well my answer is a little mixed. i say absolutely people should live and build wherever they want with one big if. if they are willing to bear the cost either them or the city or the local government of disaster s. look, build i live a mile from the ocean on a canal. i have flood insurance. if the house gets flooded which it might in my lifetime and everything is ruined i am prepared for that but what i am not expecting is to go to the government hat in hand and say i chose to live here now everyone else in the country bail me out. that s houston could have done a lot. they built a whole city on soil that does not absorb water. it s not sponge-like at all. they took that risk but now they have to go to everyone else in the u.s. to bail them out. it s not fair for everyone else. it s not fair for the people of houston. dagen: but john how do you money for a storm of such historic proportions that might
people ic advantage of other people but i ll second gary b and say prices and economics are just information telling us about scarcity so you stop the price gouging by stopping the scarcity. price gouging laws that forbid it actually contribute to greater scarcity. dagen: well it s a palling behavior and i m glad i m not near any of the people gouging because they are going to get that. thanks guys and thanks for joining us. thank you. dagen: humanity showing its best side as harvey wrecked parts of texas and louisiana, a company that s stepping up to help the victims out, next.
happen once every 500 years? it s almost impossible. a lot of these places were not flood zones. you have to understand houston is above sea live el as new orleans is below sea level. they made a mistake with addicks and barker reservoir and made a mistake in zoning because so much airable land water has nowhere to go. they need to fix that as far as where people should live people should live wherever they want to but i agree with gary b. if they are in a flood zone they need to be required to have flood insurance. dagen: but that s figuring out how to get people to pay for it. about 80% of the properties damaged or lost weren t covered by insurance because of the way they calculated what was the flood risk. you know, i think the answers to all these questions should be as local as possible and of course, local governments want to reconsider their infrastructure, reconsider using different surfaces instead of asphalt that s up for the people in the local area to decide to make t