It's been a rough hurricane season. Between them, Hurricanes Helene and Milton have devastated many communities throughout the southeast. Rebuilding what was lost will take years.

But as devastating as these storms have been, they are sadly not unique. Property damage from storms and flooding is on the rise. Storms resulting in over a billion dollars in damages have become more frequent in recent years.

The prospect of repeatedly having to rebuild properties in storm-prone areas has led some governments to pursue an unusual solution to the problem: buy the properties themselves. Some local governments, in partnership with federal agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), have developed programs that use disaster relief funds to purchase homes in flood- or storm-prone areas. This isn't the only way, or even the best way, to reduce the destruction from increasingly severe natural catastrophes. But the idea is that keeping such vulnerable properties vacant will save money in the long run because they won't need to be continually rebuilt after storms.

Such buyouts are hardly ideal and can lead to some perverse situations. In 2021, an NPR investigation revealed that HUD was selling homes in flood-prone areas to unsuspecting buyers even as it was buying out homes in the same neighborhoods under a flood mitigation program. While not ideal, in a world where government disaster relief is a given, a voluntary buyout program could make fiscal sense in some circumstances. Voluntary buyout programs have been implemented in over a thousand counties and have been used to relocate almost 50,000 households throughout the country.

The situation is very different when the buyout ceases to be voluntary. A little-known provision in the Hazard Mitigation and Relocation Assistance Act of 1993 authorizes local governments to implement a mandatory buyout program for flood-prone areas. So far, just three localities—Cedar Rapids in Iowa, Minot in North Dakota, and Harris County in Texas—have adopted a mandatory buyout program. The Harris County program is the largest of the three and is expected to forcibly purchase 585 households and 390 businesses by 2026 and turn the land into green space.

Most local governments have been wary of taking advantage of mandatory buyout authority, and for good reason. While states have the power of eminent domain and may use federal funds for this purpose under the law, the process is always fraught and ripe for abuse. With a voluntary buyout, governments must offer a purchase price high enough to entice homeowners to sell. But when the buyout is mandatory, governments have the incentive to low-ball their payments. Such programs can also raise other issues. Harris County faced accusations of discrimination since its mandatory buyout program had operated chiefly in majority-Hispanic neighborhoods while majority-white neighborhoods with similar flood risk profiles were offered voluntary buyouts or other flood mitigation options.

Instead of taking people's homes, the government should be looking for other ways to reduce flood risk. Both the federal and state governments have long encouraged development in storm-prone areas by offering below-market-rate flood insurance and other forms of assistance. These subsidies should stop, and the government should do more to make people aware of the risks faced by homeowners in vulnerable areas. Governments could also focus on increasing efforts to make vulnerable areas more resilient to storms. Research suggests that a dollar spent on resilience saves as much as $13 in avoided future losses.

Beyond these matters of dollars and cents, there is a question of values. America is a nation founded by risk-takers, where liberty and property rights are given priority. The desire to protect the lives of American citizens—as well as the public purse—is commendable, and the government should, of course, not subsidize risky behavior. But the desire for safety cannot become an excuse to force people out of their own homes.

At various universities around the country, Students for Justice in Palestine and other pro-Hamas groups are holding events on October 7. Some of these events celebrate Palestinian "resistance," while others, throwing in a blood libel for good measure, commemorate a non-existent genocide of Palestinians by Israel since the war in Gaza began.

Let's recall what happened on October 7, 2023. Thousands of Hamas terrorists, followed by "civilian" hangers-on, attacked border towns in southern Israel along with a music festival. The perpetrators recorded themselves gleefully murdering innocent people–peacenik kibbutznik and party-goers, children in front of their parents (there is one harrowing video you can find online of an eight-year-old girl asking, in vain, that the terrorists murder her), not the elderly, just everyone in their path. The murders were often undertaken in the most gruesome ways, including burning people alive. They also undertook an orgy of rape and torture, and kidnapped a few hundred Israelis, from a baby to an eighty-five year-old.

Let's also recall that on October 7, woefully underprepared Israeli forces struggled to repel the invasion. Not a single Israel soldier entered Gaza that day.

This tells us two things. First, those who see October 7 as anything but a day that should be devoted to the memory of the innocents brutally murdered, raped, tortured, and kidnapped that day at the very least are indifferent to that suffering, and at worst applaud the worst violence against Jews since the Holocaust. Unfortunately, many are in the latter category. As Seth Mandel writes, "American universities are full of psychopaths both in the student body and often in the professoriate (and sometimes administration)."

Second, there is no reason for anyone protesting the Israeli response in Gaza to the war Hamas started to use October 7 as a commemorative date, except to intentionally intrude on Jewish memory and commemorations of the atrocities of that day. To again quote Mandel, they choose October 7 "not despite the pain it causes Jews on campus but because of that pain." It's a form of emotional and political warfare, as if on September 11, 2002 students held events about a purported genocide by US forces fighting the Taliban.

So what should be done about morally repugnant university events to be held on October 7? If, as at Wake Forest, such events are sponsored by university academic departments, a university is well within its rights to shut them down, as Wake Forest did. Academic departments are subdivisions of the university, and the university may tell these departments that it refuses to allow its subdivisions, speaking as agents of the university, to sponsor events using October 7 for pro-Hamas propaganda.

For student events, however, the answer is that nothing should be done by university officials. At public universities, students have a First Amendment right to be as openly morally repugnant as they choose. Thus, a Maryland judge was correct in rebuffing the University of Maryland's attempt to stifle a pro-Hamas October 7 event. At private universities, if the university has a policy of not censoring student political events, it should not make an exception for these.

Yes, it's true that at many universities there would be a far stronger administrative reaction to an event celebrating the lynching of black people, or gay-bashing, or atrocities against Native Americans, and so on. And if students can prove that the university treats Jewish students' complaints and concerns differently than other groups', that is valid grounds for a lawsuit or Title VI complaint. And university officials certainly have no excuse not to denounce October 7 celebrations if (and only if) they regularly denounce other student events they find morally repugnant. (And of course, counter-demonstrations must also be permitted.)

Part of me wishes that I could make a principled argument for shutting these events down, but part of me does not. The groups holding these events are quite openly and publicly telling you who they are and what they believe in. To quote Mandel once more, their "leaders don't want to wait a day to hold the rally because while any other day could mark the war, no other day could mark the murder and mayhem of Oct. 7. The day is important to them because the massacre of Jews is important to them." And that's important information to have.

Many Americans who return home after being illegally detained overseas arrive to find they've been billed thousands of dollars by the IRS—including late fees for unpaid taxes.

That's the bizarre situation in which hostages Evan Gerskovich, Paul Whelan, and Vladimir Kara-Murza found themselves after they were released from detention in Russia last month. All three men say they faced a battery of surprise financial issues after returning home, including tax charges and hits to the credit stemming from bills they were unable to pay while behind bars.

"I got one of those bills from the IRS saying, you owe this much on this year, you owe this much on this year because of failure to pay on time—here's the interest that's accrued," Washington Post reporter and former hostage Jason Rezaian told NPR. He faced more than $6,000 in fees for unpaid taxes after his release, following 544 days of detention in Iran. "This is an oversight that nobody really thought about."

And they're not alone. Right now, between 40 and 60 American nationals are being illegally detained by other nations, according to NPR. Many of these Americans will return home to face startling financial penalties stemming from their unjust imprisonment.

The IRS, for its own part, claims that it doesn't have the legal authority to remove tax fees for returning hostages. However, that could change. Earlier this year, Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) introduced the Stop Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, an aptly named bill that would require the IRS to exempt hostages from tax liability during the period of their detainment. The bill would also force the IRS to allow hostages and their spouses to apply to have their tax-related fines removed.

If Coons' bill passes, it would solve a small but frustrating problem in our robotic tax system. It's a no-brainer that someone illegally detained abroad can't pay their Netflix subscription on time—much less their taxes. In addition to dealing with the horrors of being held hostage in a foreign country and dealing with the rocky transition back to normal life, former detainees shouldn't also get slapped with thousands of dollars of fines for taxes they never could have paid in the first place.