Don't know where you lived where there were drive-by shootings. Nothing like that around my area, but certainly in other areas of the Bay Area. Wouldn't live in Los Angeles if you gave me a free house in Beverly Hills.

The building in flood plains and the building of cabins on Forest Service property where in the normal course of events the rivers ARE going to flood and the forests ARE going to burn is criminal. Far more of a conscious decision to lose everything than living in an earthquake zone.

I won't go into details here, but it is highly instructive to research how much development in areas that one would normally think are not worth developing was subsidized by the government. Dikes, roads, dredging, dams, landfills, you name it. Like a lot of other government incentives, the short-term result looks good: rapid economic development. The long term disadvantages don't show up immediately, and have no immediate political consequences.

Government economic "incentives" to encourage investment where investments would not normally go are a lot like drinking sea water when you are stranded on a raft. Works for a while.

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It's hard to imagine how our nation would have grown under a purer limited-government laizzes-faire system. I've studied small sectors of the economy to see what might have happened, but there is no way to really nail down the big picture. L. Neil Smith's "Probability Broach" was an SF look at the idea, even more anarchist than what I would like, but I don't know how accurate a guess it is.

What would have happened to a more free U.S.? Without "manifest destiny," the nation might be smaller. Not sure if there would be "states" as such. Would have had to pay the Indians one HELL of a lot more than we did for land--private contracts, not government treaties--and they'd probably be the Rockefellers of our current era. Don't know what would have happened when we hit the borders of territories claimed by less libertarian nations. Development would have been slower in a lot of areas. Faster in others. Maybe more trains, fewer roads. More people living in fewer areas, probably. More decentralized solutions to things like power and utilities. Would make an interesting project, and require someone with a more solid knowledge of history than I have.