July 31, 2012
Juche has been described as the state religion of North Korea. Attributed to the late dictator Kim Il-sung, the Juche philosophy interpolates Marxist concepts of the deconstructed self and applies them to a fervently nationalistic ideology that breaks from the old, globalist Marxist notion of “The Internationale” and instead stresses political independence, economic self-sustenance and self-reliance [...]
July 31, 2012
Albert Einstein once said ”a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” Or, as it often paraphrased, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Proponents of shrinking Citizens Property Insurance Corp. by paying private insurers to take out policies [...]
July 26, 2012
There was a time, not so far in the distant past, when virtually all property and casualty insurance rates were calculated by industry-owned rate bureaus. It wasn’t necessarily a terrible system. Smaller insurers could compete on relatively even ground with the big guns, because all had access to the same data for underwriting and rate-setting [...]
July 26, 2012
Click the video above to listen to the full audio of R Street Institute Associate Fellow Brad Rodu discussing tobacco harm reduction earlier this year on WKU, a National Public Radio affiliate in Bowling Green, Ky. photo by: bsterling
July 25, 2012
I’m in New Orleans at a conference on Preparing the Gulf Coast for Extreme Weather. Its lead sponsor is a reinsurer; the Institute for Building and Home Safety is here; and there are lots of insurance people around. The preponderance of the audience, however, consists of environmentalists. None of the people I know here self-identify [...]
July 25, 2012
A few years ago following a number of major hurricanes, the public relations staff of the property casualty insurance company I was employed by at the time managed to get a placement in the New York Times which suggested that the company was pulling back from what had been an unusually unprofitable coastal exposure. Regulators [...]
July 25, 2012
Galveston Mayor Joe Jaworski is taking on U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan over $589 million in disaster relief funds. The federal government is threatening to pull all of the funding if public housing flooded in Hurricane Ike is not rebuilt. However, the mayor’s vision is to break the culture of poverty and [...]
July 24, 2012
In what turned out to be very good news for taxpayers, the environment and anyone concerned about risk mitigation, the speeding legislative train that was Sen. John Hoeven’s S. 2039 was derailed in the U.S. House yesterday. The bill, which would lift a restriction of the federal Stafford Act to allow permanent levees to be constructed [...]
July 19, 2012
The Citizens Property Insurance Corp.’s governing board convened a workshop in Miami this week to address various issues facing the state-run insurer, including its inadequate rates, ballooning book of business and recent complaints about how the company is going about its reinspection program. After opening remarks by Chairman Carlos LaCasa, newly appointed Citizens President Barry [...]
July 18, 2012
Mid-morning tomorrow, I’ll be attending a meeting in the office of Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., to debate be “educated about” the senator’s bill to exempt his state from requirements that it follow federal laws about preserving floodplains. Although I come to this with an open mind, I seriously doubt that there’s any way that the [...]
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