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Tim Fromm and his family owned a house on Lake Delton worth nearly $1 million until last week, when flood waters cut a new a channel to the Wisconsin River, drained the lake, washed away their home and turned their lakeshore property into a mudfront lot.

What is society’s obligation to the Fromm family? Does the government owe them another $1 million lakefront home? A less expensive house with no lake frontage? Anything?

These are the difficult questions raised by catastrophic flooding that has devastated southern Wisconsin. Tomah survived relatively unscathed, but locales only a short drive from Tomah were overwhelmed by walls of water that left behind hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage. The disaster also shoved the issue of flood insurance into the political spotlight.

Lake Delton is one of many Wisconsin communities that wasn’t enrolled in the flood insurance program subsidized by the federal government. Communities are required to submit floodplain maps before any residents can buy insurance under the federal program. Since no private insurer will risk selling policies that cover flood-prone properties, including million-dollar homes on a lake, the residents of Lake Delton had no other insurance options and were left uninsured.

If conservative political principles are applied, the federal government owes the Fromms and anyone else who lost their homes or businesses on Lake Delton (or anywhere else, for that matter) nothing. Doesn’t lakefront property carry the risk of high water, dam failure, etc.? Some families on Lake Delton may have “lost everything,” but was it really prudent for a family to sink its entire life’s savings into an uninsured asset that sits next to the water? Where in the Constitution does it authorize Congress to collect tax dollars and spend it on disaster relief?

Are these legitimate points? It depends on whether society believes disaster relief is an individual or collective responsibility. The private sector has made its judgment on flood relief -- it has no more interest in providing insurance against floods than it does in providing medical insurance to sick or old people. The only mechanism to restore homes and properties is through a heavily subsidized federal program (tax-and-spend, if you like) that rejects the idea of small government.

That’s the fundamental issue that must be resolved once the flood waters recede.