Any time fire destroys a paradise, fingers point. The wildfires that killed 115 people and ravaged the village of Lahaina, Maui, exposed corruption, incompetence, and distracted bureaucracies that failed Hawaii. It could have been prevented. It could have been mitigated. It could have been stopped. On the most recent episode of The DrillDown podcast, Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers show how governmental corruption, incompetence, and misdirected incentives made the wildfire disaster on Maui worse but inevitable. Fires will happen, but governments need to re-learn old lessons of how to avoid them or make them less severe, and that means focusing on their real missions, not chasing the latest environmental fads.

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