Hurricanes$, earthquakes$, and floods$.

We should not provide federal funds to rebuild private property!" wrote Fred Morley of Free Union, VIrginia, to his senator, John Warner, as Congress voted to send more than $8.6 billion in emergency aid to California after the Los Angeles earthquake of January 17. "These people live in California voluntarily. Insurance was available, but many reported that they didn't buy it because of the cost. Why should this Virginian provide the insurance with my tax monies that the Californians voluntarily elected not to buy for themselves? That's wrong!... We need to rethink the whole concept of emergency aid from Washington. Just like those people living on the rivers in the Midwest, they knew the risk." Warner put the letter in the Congressional Record, noting: "We have to recognize that there are geographical areas in this country that are highly vulnerable to disaster and somehow recognize that we cannot go back to the American taxpayer time after time to rebuild the freeways, to restore the military bases, to rebuild the levees."

You got it, Virginians, there is a Santa Claus. It's you--and millions of other taxpayers who, one way or another, subsidize Californians and other folks rich enough, lucky enough, or foolish enough to live at water's edge or in the picturesque path of fire, mudslide, or tremors. The rest of us pay indirectly in the form of higher insurance premiums on safer ground or directly in the kind of emergency aid that prompted Mr. Morley's letter.

Subsidizing the lifestyles of the rich and famous, you see, is pan of living in the home of the free and the land of the brave. And perhaps part of what makes the rich different from you and me is that they are braver. They live or vacation in the most dangerous of places--in Malibu, Fire Island, and Westhampton Beach, along the coast in Florida and South Carolina, on the Great Lakes, and along the great rivers that divide the Midwest.

Those, of course, are also among the most beautiful (and most expensive) places to live in the country. I know because I make it a point to try to live as close as possible to my financial betters--usually just renting, but the view doesn't know that. Right now I live in Pacific Palisades, California, across the road from Arnold Schwarzenegger's place (with a moat separating it from the rest of the country), and down the hill from where Ronald Reagan lived before he became president.

As I write this, I am looking across the greens of the Riveria Country Club to Catalina Island, 26 miles across the sea on my right, and, to the left, the snowcap of Mount Baldy more than 50 miles away. The Palisades, by the way, are above the smog line. The height of the Palisades can, however, cause some problems. In the earthquake of last January 17, a few houses not far from me ended up below the smog line--on the Pacific Coast Highway, to be exact. I'm sure you saw the pictures.

In summers past, I rented on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach, New York, writing a book as I looked across the Atlantic. I imagined the next landfall was France, though actually it was New Jersey--which is where the house ended up, in pieces, after a hurricane in 1978.

That was also the year I moved to Pacific Palisades for the first time--on October 23, 1978. Within an hour after we settled in, we were preparing to evacuate as brushfires moved across the far ridge of our canyon, driven by winds of 50 miles an hour. I watched eight houses explode into puffs of bright gas just before the flames passed by us. My first earthquake was 69 days later--a 4.6 on the Richter scale, on January 1, 1979. I then realized something: Nature never meant for 10 million people to live in the Los Angeles basin, and nature wanted the basin back.

The fires of 1978 were, as fires always are, followed by mudslides. Without the root systems of gnarled little trees and other brush to hold the land in place, a little rain moves more earth than a fleet of John Deere tractors. For days that October, television news was dominated by movie producers and other Malibu folk telling sob stories and demanding that the government build a wall to stop the slides on the other side of Pacific Coast Highway. And the state did just that, with the help of federal emergency aid--all for a dozen rich people living on the beach.

On the other coast, 3,000 miles away, ocean storms in December of 1992 and March of last year swept away 81 homes on Fire Island, New York, which, like Westhampton Beach, is basically a long sandbar off the south shore of Long Island. Most of the Fire Island homes, which are summer houses, will be rebuilt with storm and flood insurance money by policies that cost as little as $900 a year. In the Midwest, the annual rates on homes along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers are as low as $300 for a $185,000 home.

Obviously, no insurance company willingly would offer those kinds of rates for homes on stilts in shifting sands where neither God nor law meant for man to settle. But under the Disaster Relief Act of 1974, the federal government mandates that insurers cover those homes and at least 2.6 million others on an assigned-risk basis. In simple terms, everyone else in the country pays higher taxes and insurance premiums to protect property that is uninsurable under any rational system. The total value of those subsidized policies is a staggering $248 billion.

Like many other government programs, the 1974 act is a good idea become bad law. The idea was the federal government would use flood insurance as a lever by only offering it where state and local governments adopted and enforced building codes that prevented new building in dangerous coastal and flood areas, and required upgrading or moving buildings in obvious danger--my house at 714 Dune Road in Westhampton Beach was a perfect example before it floated to New Jersey.

The law failed from the start. It was bailed out with $1.2 billion of federal funds in the early 1980s and may be headed for another taxpayer-financed rescue because of the $30 billion of damage caused last year by the horrific Midwestern floods and by Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992. The reason for the failure was the unwillingness of local and state officials to displease developers lusting after beach and riverfront property. State and local politics, in general, is driven by real estate money, including contributions from developers and builders. The career of Senator A1fonse D'Amato of New York is a textbook example, and so far--with help in the House of Representatives from another New York Republican, Rep. Rick Lazio--D'Amato has been able to block reform of the Disaster Relief Act, screwing the rest of America to protect coastal homeowners and developers on Long Island.

Meanwhile in California, the last resort for homeowners seeking fire insurance in brush areas is the state's California Fair Plan Association, an assigned-risk program with 26,500 policyholders in areas where lightning has ignited brush fires in the hills since before there was a man or a woman on the planet--that is the way nature has always generated fertilizer (basically nitrates in the ash). New cycles of growth and new roots hold the hills in place above expensive coastal strips like Malibu, where for years not one home has sold for less than $1 million.

All Shook Up

The January earthquake in Los Angeles is dollar-for-dollar apparently going to be the worst natural disaster in American history--if you believe that it is natural to build great cities above great faults in the earth's crust. The total damage may reach $20 billion and by the middle of February, the number of applications for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance had reached 360,000, more than the previous high of 304,000 applications after Hurricane Hugo hit the South four years ago.

Most of the earthquake damage is not covered by insurance of any kind. There are a couple of quite natural reasons natural in the sense of human nature-that this is so. People who live in potential disaster areas tend to avoid thinking about disasters. Earthquake is the most incomprehensible of threats and the most expensive to insure against--as high as $10 a year per $1,000 of coverage. The normal deductible is 10 percent of property value. Therefore most homeowners cannot get any kind of coverage for normal damage that costs less than the deductible: cracked walls, broken pipes or windows, crumbled chimneys in the living room.

So Californians, great Western individualists all, beginning with our Republican governor, Pete Wilson, want government on our backs this time. Actually, we want a ride on government's back. Our first official demands were that the rest of the nation pay for the risks we took to live in the sun by the sea. In fact, Californians have started joking that there are seasons here: fire, flood, earthquake, and riot. I'd add another: aid.

President Clinton said that because of the size of the quake, and the fact that California has had fire this year, too, and is in stubborn economic recession, he was recommending that the federal government waive its requirement that states put up 25 percent of disaster aid to match the federal share of 75 percent. Instead, Clinton said, California would have to put up only 10 percent. Not good enough, said Wilson. He was holding out for zero percent.

Paula Boland, the State Assemblywoman from Northridge, the community at the epicenter of the earthquake, agreed totally with the governor. Boland, whose home was hit hard enough to leave her sleeping in a car in case her house collapsed overnight, was asked by the Los Angeles Times whether she would favor a temporary state sales tax increase to finance relief and rebuilding after the after-shocks.

"No," she said. "People are taxed to death. We've got to start finding ways to conserve money."

But surely, said the Times reporter, George Skelton, tax money was needed to rebuild broken freeways and such. "The feds," she said, "are going to have to come through for us. The president owes us .... They've taken our military bases and all those jobs. They're going to have to start giving something back to California."

That is the true voice of California, a state that feels owed to, a state that sees misfortune as somebody else's problem, always somebody else's fault. Even ignoring the fact that the federal government gets its money from taxation, too, it was the feds (or taxpayers in the rest of the country) who built the dams on the Colorado River that made the world-class development of Southern California possible and who created defense and aerospace industries that made the Southland, as we call it, so rich for so long so effortlessly.

You see, out here we all feel as if we live in Malibu--or should. Just pay up, so we can get back to complaining about Washington and big government.

Richard Reeves is a syndicated columnist and the author of President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993).