This article is adapted from a talk given at California’s Decline: A Warning to America in San Diego, California, on April 25, 2026.
I’ll continue with the theme of establishing our connections to California. I was born here and spent a good deal of my childhood here. My mother’s family moved to Southern California when she entered high school, and my father’s side of the family settled in Northern California in the 1840s. They actually took a covered wagon across the country.
Eventually my parents met and got married in the Los Angeles area. My siblings and I were all born in a Santa Monica hospital and then raised in the Pacific Palisades, in a house—or, really, in a neighborhood—that was entirely destroyed by a wildfire last year.
But we’ll get to that.
For now I’m going to continue with my personal story for a bit because I think it’ll be helpful for understanding how I came to the broader concepts about natural disasters like wildfires that I’m going to be laying out here.
My family lived in the Palisades until I was nine years old. And some of my earliest memories there involve earthquake drills at school and having to navigate fire risk. Getting evacuated from a summer camp because of a fire, as an example, is a particularly vivid early memory of mine.
And, at some point, I don’t remember how, I stumbled upon a book all about natural disasters. It had pictures, examples, anecdotes, and statistics about all major natural disasters— hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides, volcanic eruptions, everything.
I was obsessed with this book.
I remember being absolutely fascinated, in part by the crazy pictures, but more so, I was fascinated that that scale of destruction was possible without a villain.
In complete contrast to all the movies and novels I was consuming, where any time anything really bad happened it was entirely the fault of some powerful bad guy that the heroes then had to defeat to make everything right again, these natural disasters were nobody’s fault—at least not directly.
There was no straightforward villain in some shadowy lair with a dark hood who could be defeated to end floods, earthquakes, and fires for good.
The way to face natural disasters was different. It required us to first understand how they work, or why they happen, and then to work around the constraints uncovered by that research when deciding things like where to live, how to build a building, or when to avoid visiting some area. Basically, deciding how to act.
So, for me, this sparked a real interest in understanding how the earth works from a very young age. And, skipping way ahead, that interest was a pretty big reason I decided to study geology when I got to college.
At the college I went to, the academic track culminated in a year-and-a-half-long independent research project. And so, lo and behold, I decided to do mine about natural disasters, specifically floods.
The town where I went to college in Ohio was hit by a terrible flood a little over 50 years before I started this project. Back in 1969, 27 people died and a lot of structures were destroyed. And for a small town like that one, that was particularly devastating. So that disaster inspired me to look further into floods in that town.
My research was, at the start, somewhat typical for a geology department at a small liberal arts college at the peak of the latest wave of climate change hysteria. I looked at precipitation and river discharge records for the area and did some basic statistical analysis to determine if the likelihood of an extreme flooding event had changed since that big flood in 1969.
Pretty typical stuff. The title was “Effects of Global Climate Change on Extreme Flooding Events in Wooster, Ohio,” the town my school was in.
I’ll note, by the way, that even though my tiny liberal arts school was overall very left leaning, when it came to actually studying climate science, the professors and the other students were all very rigorous. Actual climate science is very complex and nuanced, and not nearly as scary or concerning as the news media tries to make it sound.
But, anyway, I did that analysis and found that, yes, there was a slight increase in the probability of an extreme precipitation event over the 118 years I was analyzing. A tiny upward trend that was statistically significant.
For a lot of people, that’s where you’d stop. You say, “Okay, frequency of extreme weather and floods is getting higher, and therefore, the town is in more danger than it was back when the risk was lower.” That seems straightforward enough.
However, by this point I had found a new obsession, one that was far more intense than my interest in earth science or natural disasters had ever been.
And that was mises.org.
I had found the site the summer before and, while I was working on this project, I was devouring every article that would go up every single day and was reading as many of the free digital books as I could make time for.
I was learning a lot about how society and government actually work, and specifically how impactful human choices, institutions, and government policies are, even in spheres that don’t seem all that related.
So, with all that rattling around in my head, I knew not to stop with a change in the probability of a flood happening, because there’s more to the story.
It’s not just about whether or not a flood occurs. If we’re talking about human well-being, another incredibly important factor for determining flood danger is what, specifically, is getting flooded. In other words, what is the land in the floodplain used for?
There is, for example, a big difference between an empty, abandoned parking lot getting flooded and a dense neighborhood full of families sleeping in old, delicate homes getting flooded.
And further, this factor—land use—can change over time.
So it’s not enough to conclude that the danger posed by floods is increasing because the chance of a flood occurring has gone up. You also have to look at how the land use in the floodplain has evolved over that time frame.
So that’s what I did. I used aerial photography from around the time of that massive flood in 1969 and modern-day satellite imagery, and painstakingly mapped the land use in and around the floodplain, sorting it into categories like industrial, commercial, agricultural, wilderness, and residential.
I also used zoning maps and physical visits when necessary to make sure I was being as accurate as possible. It was extremely tedious. But what I found was that the land use had changed dramatically.
When the deadly 1969 flood happened, a substantial portion of the floodplain was full of houses. There were two neighborhoods there. And the houses were small, meaning there were more of them. Those neighborhoods were very densely populated.
And those neighborhoods are, unsurprisingly, where a lot of the deaths occurred. A lot of those homes were also destroyed. Fast-forward to 2019, and the land use was very different.
The floodplain was now mostly full of farms and industrial warehouses that were mostly storing paintbrushes produced nearby. There were a few isolated storefronts and virtually no residences.
It’s, of course, bad for a field full of crops that can’t handle a lot of water, or a warehouse storing products on or near the floor, to flood. But that is not nearly as bad a catastrophe as a dense neighborhood flooding.
And I’m not trying to make some interpersonal utility comparison. I expect that the owners of flooded fields and warehouses, while not happy, would prefer that over a flood washing away their own homes where their children are sleeping.
So, long story short, using some specific methodology I got from another paper, I was able to conclude that, even though the risk of a flood had ticked up slightly, the danger that floods posed to the town had declined drastically. The town was actually far safer, even though floods were becoming more frequent.
I’ve taken all this time to lay this out because this is how I came to understand something that is, unfortunately, not well understood by most people, which is that humans have a tremendous amount of agency in how dangerous natural disasters end up being.
If you listen to public discourse after some flood, hurricane, or fire ends up being destructive enough to make national news, you’ll see the same pattern.
The Left will act like the only thing that can be done—the only possible way to avoid that kind of destruction going forward—is to deindustrialize society.
It’s not always said directly, because it’s obviously scientifically delusional, but they often heavily imply that, if we just deindustrialize, in a few decades we’ll have far fewer natural disasters—if any—and they will be far less damaging.
This is dangerous, because the policies they roll out to “address climate change” are attacking the very technologies and institutions that are making these disasters more survivable.
The Right, if they address these claims at all, will point out that this is crazy. But that’s usually it. There’s typically this sense from everyone who’s not bought into the climate hysteria that these are unfortunate occurrences but there’s really nothing that can be done.
But there is!
Not really to address the frequency, at least for most types of natural disasters, but certainly to make people safer from them. And the good news is that we’re already doing it.
Unsurprisingly, humans don’t passively sit around and just let the earth do what it’s going to do to us. We’re actors, after all.
And, as a whole, humans have proven to be excellent at building a safer world for ourselves, despite what the planet throws at us. That’s especially true in the last hundred years. Climate-related deaths are down over 97 percent since 1920. By some measures it’s over 99 percent.
Because it turns out people want to live comfortably.
And when you have market-centered institutions like sound money and a private property norm that allow society to transcend poverty and grow wealthier, people, unsurprisingly, value more comfortable, safer living conditions and infrastructure, and everything that entails.
However, there is one big saboteur threatening and holding up this process: the government.
Obviously, anything the government does to hamper wealth creation sabotages this remarkable effort to make the world even safer for humans. But there are also tons of ways that governments—at all levels—are actively making things worse in regard to the destructiveness and survivability of specific natural disasters.
And being that this is an event focused on California, I want to focus on wildfires. Because not only does this state burn a lot, but all levels of government here are doing some specific things that make these fires worse. So let’s get into it.
As I’m sure everyone here knows well, California and wildfires go hand in hand. This state as a whole might have some of the best weather in the world, but it’s also cursed with an almost perfectly ideal climate for fire.
In Northern California you have coniferous forest and in Southern California, chaparral or shrubland, all of which is frequently very dry. And that combination is important. Deserts are very dry, but they’re so dry that they have very little vegetation. Other biomes like rainforests have tons of vegetation, but they get a lot of precipitation, so that vegetation is not all that flammable.
But here you have, in a lot of ways, the worst of both worlds. You have plenty of vegetation, and plenty of dryness—not to mention frequent strong winds, like the Santa Anas.
However, what you also have are a lot of humans. A lot of people live here and have lived here for a long time. Humans have navigated and managed that risk, mostly with land management. If we look back to the early settlers of this region, the Native Americans, they were using controlled burns to make the areas they were living in safer for at least hundreds of years before European settlers got here—potentially even thousands.
But there are other measures, especially in modern times, such as specific infrastructure that helps with fire prevention and, of course, modern firefighting.
Living with and navigating fire risk is a great example of what I was talking about when I said humans are good at adapting our environments to our benefit. And we’re getting much better at it as we grow wealthier.
But the government has and is really sabotaging that. And when it comes to the specifics—the various ways that all levels of government make things worse in regard to fires here in California— there are just too many examples for me to cover in one talk.
There are problems with the monopolized utility companies and their infrastructure; water infrastructure and hydrant pressure; some of CAL FIRE’s tactics. There’s a lot we could talk about. But I want to focus on two specific things the government does—the two that I view as the most damaging.
If you look at my title, I chose those words very deliberately. The state makes wildfires both bigger and deadlier.
So, first, how does government make fires bigger?
Well, in short, it’s primarily through government ownership—or monopolization—of land, combined with a lack of adequate land management, all fortified with a lack of liability.
There’s a lot there. So what am I saying?
Well, to start, the government owns a lot of land. In total, around 50% to 52% of California’s land is owned by some level of government. And much of that is wilderness. In fact, virtually all wilderness in California is government owned. Only about 1% to 3% is privately owned.
Now, when we say government owned we don’t really mean owned. If we’re using a Rothbardian framework the government isn’t and can’t be a just owner. It’s more accurate to say government controlled or government monopolized.
Monopolized in the sense that the government prevents anyone from using or changing that land in any way unless the government officially allows it.
This is something that’s often glossed over in these discussions but that’s really important to sit with for a second.
In California, government has secured a monopoly over roughly half the land. That monopolization creates a very specific set of conditions where the government can do real damage through inaction. In this case inaction in regard to forest management.
That might sound counterintuitive coming from a libertarian. Isn’t our whole thing that we want the government to not do stuff?
Well, yes, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. This is something that Joshua Mawhorter and I started digging into in a paper we presented at this year’s Libertarian Scholars Conference. Our name for this concept is interventionist noninterventionism.
The pattern we identified and are attempting to bring into the established Rothbardian typology of government intervention is a situation where the government first monopolizes some service—preventing anybody from offering the service in its place. Then, they tax people to pay for the service. And then, they refuse to provide that service.
Our argument is, essentially, that when those first conditions are met—especially the prevention of alternative service providers— it creates a situation where now when the government doesn’t provide that service, it’s a problem. We identified things like police inaction, denial of socialized healthcare, and neglecting road repairs as examples.
But, returning to the topic at hand, the problem is that government officials have assumed control over the management of around half of the state’s land, and nearly all of California’s wilderness. And not just assumed control but monopolized it. They prevent anyone else from managing all this wilderness without their express permission. And then, they just refuse to manage it—at least sufficiently.
There are a lot of reasons for that. A major one is this pervasive and frankly antihuman strain of thought within environmentalism which values untouched wilderness above all else. It’s a version of environmentalism that doesn’t seek to make the environment safe and pleasant for humans but to protect the environment from humans. That’s an important distinction. (To go deeper into this I recommend checking out Alex Epstein’s work. He calls it anti-impact environmentalism).
But, effectively, the idea is that if the governments going to “conserve” a patch of wilderness, than it should remain entirely untouched by humans. We should allow nature to do what nature’s going to do.
That sounds nice in theory, but in practice, here in California, that often means allowing an extremely dangerous buildup of fuel.
Remember what I said earlier. Native Americans and early settlers had been managing this land for centuries. But then, the government came in, took control of almost all the remaining wilderness, monopolized the management of it, and then—essentially—did nothing.
For a long time, controlled burns were outlawed in California. It’s not the only form of forest management. You can physically clear out vegetation or cut fire lines. But controlled burns are a very effective way to clear out fuel when winds are low and the risk of a fire growing out of control is negligible.
They are, fortunately, not prohibited anymore, but the process is still so politicized that it remains a major problem. As an example, six years ago, in 2020, the state signed an agreement with the US Forest Service that both would conduct prescribed burns and mechanical thinning on at least 500,000 acres of wilderness each, every single year, meaning a combined total of a million acres a year would be cleared of fuel annually, at minimum.
And every year since, both the California and the federal government have failed to get even close to that minimum. California has averaged about a fifth of what they’re supposed to treat, the Forest Service, about 40%.
Now, this whole time, the government in California has maintained strict regulations on the vegetation private citizens have on their land. And I’m sure government officials have continued to crack down hard on anyone who isn’t up to code.
But the government itself consistently falls far short of the standards they promised to abide by, which themselves probably fall far short of what’s actually needed. And remember, that accounts for essentially all the wilderness in the state—the land where these wildfires start. And all of this is worth stressing because it’s really why these fires are so bad.
When a major fire breaks out, we tend to focus a lot on the origin, on what caused the spark that started it all. And that’s certainly important. There’s a lot we could talk about regarding the negligence of state-created or state-protected utility companies, for example. But as important as the initial spark is, you don’t get a major fire without fuel.
Take the Los Angeles fires from January of last year. It was actually two fires, the Eaton fire in Altadena which is believed to have been started by power lines and the Palisades fire that a man has been arrested and charged for allegedly starting on purpose. He pleaded not guilty, though, and his trial is reportedly going to happen later this year.
So, basically, you have these two separate ignitions that happened to occur while there were extremely powerful Santa Ana winds. Not a great situation, but that wasn’t all.
This was early 2025. In 2022 and 2023, the Los Angeles area experienced a lot of rainfall. Those were, relatively speaking, very wet years for the region. And that spurred the growth of a lot of brush and grasses in the government-controlled, government-managed hills around LA.
Then, 2024 was an exceptionally hot year, with almost no rain during what was supposed to be the wet season, which dried out the now-abundant vegetation, creating a very dangerous amount of fuel around the city—the management of which fuel the government had monopolized and then, according to their own metrics, failed to carry out.
Which means, when that power line sparked, and—if the charges are true—that taxi driver lit some bushes on fire, it transformed what should have been a small grass fire into a city killer. A fire that destroyed, effectively, the entire Pacific Palisades.
Now, there’s a bit of important nuance here. What I’m not saying is that the government should strip out all vegetation on all the land they own or that wildfires are entirely avoidable and only happen because of the government.
The world is inherently risky, and the risk of fires, even serious fires, can never be completely eliminated.
But a reason we can be quite confident that the level of forest management is lower, and therefore that the current situation is more dangerous, than it would be without government control of all this land is the lack of liability.
Let’s think about how this would work if we at the Mises Institute got our way, all this government land was privatized, and the territory of California instantly adopted a stateless Rothbardian private or anarcho-capitalist legal order.
Assume that suddenly, all that government-owned wilderness is privately owned. Right off the bat, one important difference is that there would—in all likelihood—be many different property owners. It would be so prohibitively expensive for one private entity to own and manage all the land currently owned by government. There isn’t even a single government that owns all of it now. It’s split between federal, state, and local governments.
Another thing I’d expect is that a lot of land would remain wilderness. People value nature. They demand nature, specifically some level of accessible nature, as consumers. When a lot of people picture all the land in California being privatized, they probably picture things like Yosemite getting turned into a parking lot. But the fact is that people pay to visit Yosemite because it is not a parking lot.
That’s an outlier, though. I imagine most private parks would be closer to the local and state parks we already enjoy in and around our towns— albeit with locations and sizes more in line with consumer demand and opportunity cost.
There would probably also be private camps, or more enclosed wilderness. Also, some people like living in remote houses surrounded by a lot of wilderness. There would also probably be areas that are just remote, meaning land is cheap and people buy it to hold on to, or speculators trade it based on the resources that could potentially be cultivated on it.
The point is that there are a lot of reasons why we would expect a good amount of what is currently wilderness to remain wilderness. And so, getting back to my point, these private wilderness owners would be responsible for managing their land.
So what would happen if they just didn’t, if they allowed a bunch of fuel to build up and it caught fire? Well, if it was contained to their property, then they just lost a portion of their property, which, depending on what it’s used for, could mean heavy economic losses.
But if it spread beyond their property, the situation is different. Now they are at least partially responsible for the destruction of someone else’s property. And that, in the Rothbardian framework, is a crime.
Rothbard wrote an excellent essay called “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” where he digs into how a stateless, private legal system would handle something like air pollution. His argument—grounded in common law and libertarian theory—is that any invasion of property that interferes with the owner’s exclusive possession, use, or enjoyment of it is unjust, and therefore a crime that would justify forcibly collecting restitution.
Rothbard didn’t write specifically about fires in that paper, but the framework carries over pretty well. If you own some land and you let it fill up with fuel that ignites into a massive inferno that destroys your neighbor’s farm and a few nearby businesses, that is your fault. And if it happens in the middle of the night or very quickly and people are hurt or killed, that is also your fault. Obviously, if that’s the case, it is very much in your interest to make sure that the risk of that happening is as low as you can get it.
Now another component of Rothbard’s argument that is a bit more controversial, but that I’m convinced by, is that property owners are “strictly liable.” Meaning if your property is destroyed in a fire that started and grew on your neighbor’s land, and this is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, your neighbor is liable even if they managed their land well and the reason the fire started and spread was not their fault—such as lightning striking a dead tree during once-ina- generation winds.
That may seem unfair, but as Rothbard points out, you also have to look from the perspective of the victim whose property was destroyed. Once again, there is an inherent, inescapable risk of that happening—especially in California.
But because there is a risk that you, as a property owner, could do everything right and still accidentally contribute to either the outbreak or fueling of a fire that threatens the person or property of others, there would probably be demand for insurance against such an occurrence, for someone to help cover the restitution in the event of an accident.
And when insurance gets involved, the incentives line up even better. Because now, investing in land management on your property is not about avoiding some vague, hypothetical restitution bill that may never come due, it’s a way to lower premiums. You now basically have an entire industry focused on monitoring and trading risk related to wildfires, a market that would put financial pressure on those who are not managing their land well.
I realize I’m getting far into the weeds here. And we could debate the specifics of strict liability or what land use would look like without a state. But the point is that that system of liability—and all the good, risk-reducing incentives it brings—is almost entirely absent from the way things work now.
Government officials are not liable like private property owners would be in the absence of all this government privilege. There is no automatic restitution being paid by the government any time their failure to properly manage the land they control leads to widespread property destruction or death. If there is restitution at all, the bar for it to kick in is far higher and—in classic government fashion—the bill is paid by taxpayers, not the officials responsible.
One of the core characteristics of government is that it immunizes itself from accountability in ways the rest of us can’t. The best you can hope for is that the negligence is on such a level that a handful of officials get fired. But even that leaves the broken system in place.
So, to review, government makes wildfires bigger and more destructive by taking control of nearly all the wilderness in the state, monopolizing the management of dangerous dried-out vegetation—or fuel—on that land, and then failing to carry out that management according to the standards they set for themselves. Standards that probably fall far short of where they would be if the government weren’t protecting itself from liability.
So that’s the bigger side. What about deadlier?
Essentially, the state intervenes in insurance markets.
In an unhampered insurance market, the prices people pay for coverage are very situational. Obviously the value of whatever is being covered will impact premiums, but so does risk. For natural disasters like wildfires, the risk of a fire destroying a house can change drastically from one street to the next.
Insurance providers invest a lot of time and resources in analyzing these risks so they can charge competitive prices that account for the likelihood of a claim being filed. There is no escaping the fact that homeowners’ insurance will be expensive in high-risk areas. But that’s not something we should even want to escape.
High insurance prices are how the market both signals that an area is a risky place to live and dissuades people—especially the poorest and therefore most vulnerable households in society— from living in these high-risk areas. But when governments mess with insurance prices through subsidies, cheap public insurance, or price controls, they begin to warp those incentives.
And for decades now, the State of California has intervened in insurance markets in the name of making prices more “fair and equitable.” In practice this has meant artificially low insurance premiums that incentivize more people to move to dangerous, fire-prone areas than would do so if prices were allowed to convey the true underlying risk.
To get specific, in 1988, California passed Proposition 103, the Insurance Rate Reduction and Reform Act, a law that forced insurance prices down by 20%, banned providers from using forecasts of future risk to set prices, and subjected all future price increases to government oversight.
Immediately, rates were severely decoupled from risk, and the state saw extensive development in some very fire-prone areas. There have been some attempts to reform this setup in the decades since, but insurance prices are still extremely constrained, or hampered, by the government.
Similarly, California has politicized reinsurance prices. You can think of reinsurance as insurance for insurance providers. These firms are structured to cover single houses burning down—not entire towns. So, they go to reinsurance providers to get covered in the event that many of their customers suddenly need to file claims at the same time. That’s arguably even more important for the kind of wildfires we’re talking about.
These constraints have led many insurance providers to leave the State of California entirely. And that has forced many residents to depend on the California FAIR Plan, which is meant to be a public insurer of last resort.
Again, all of this government meddling with insurance prices has made it artificially cheap to build and live in high-risk areas—specifically in what is called the wildland-urban interface, the transitional area between the government-owned wilderness and denser urban areas.
Which means more people live in these high-risk areas, making wildfires deadlier. Deadlier than they would be without this government intervention.
So, to conclude, in the years since I discovered that book as a kid, I’ve learned a lot about how the earth works and how natural disasters work. But I’ve also learned more about villains.
And, as it turns out, there is more than one type of villain. We often focus on what some call the external villains—Voldemort, the T. rex in Jurassic Park, or the shark in Jaws. These kinds of characters, of course, grab our attention, and rightfully so.
But there is another kind of villain, internal villains, such as Professor Umbridge, Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park, or Mayor Larry Vaughn in Jaws. These types are often more dangerous because they are supposed to be on our side. And yet, due to greed, fear, or their own moral failing, internal villains hamper or even sabotage the fight, and do so in a way that is quiet or confounding enough to lead everyone else astray.
Wildfires are one of California’s external villains. They are a literal force of nature that has been here far longer than any of us and that will, in all likelihood, never be defeated entirely. That said, Californians have shown a remarkable ability to fight back against this persistent threat to life and property.
But many of your politicians and government officials have become internal villains on this front. It’s important that we identify them as such.
