I’m not going to say anything about this deal cooking among Tea Party politicos in Florida other than, hmm . . . this seems smarmy.

The blend of politics and commerce has always been an ugly one, and it boggles my mind that some who rage about the poor using food stamps for potato chips stand by in silence when the government hands out the financial equivalent of snack companies to corporations.

The Florida example is a transaction that I find to be the most discomforting I’ve come across in a long career writing about business. (Full disclosure: Much of this involves Governor Rick Scott. Years ago when I worked at The New York Times, I investigated Columbia/HCA, where he worked as C.E.O. The reporting turned up an array of illegal activities and financial shenanigans. Scott was tossed out as C.E.O. by the board and the company went on to pay a $1.7 billion fine for cheating Medicare through the filing of false records. Scott was not charged with wrongdoing.)

The transaction involves the Citizens Property Insurance Corp., a not-for-profit, tax-exempt government corporation that provides property insurance through the state to Florida property owners. According to Citizens’ self-description, its job is to insure “hundreds of thousands of homes, businesses and condominiums whose owners otherwise might not be able to find coverage.”

What that means, of course, is that Citizens has to provide insurance at a rate lower than these buyers could obtain in the private market. That’s the nature of insurance—high rates represent high risk; the state can’t change the risk, so it is setting up a rate system that is lower than a private company could offer. In a way, it’s like group insurance for employees: the state is spreading out the risk caused by middle-class and below folks living in a hurricane zone among the taxpayers.

Now, that setup may enrage a Tea Party type who doesn’t understand the self-interest in community interest. I hate that I have to address this through the “here’s why it’s good for you” approach, rather than just saying working people shouldn’t be forced to be homeless simply because they live in Florida, but here goes:

If hundreds of thousands of people could not afford property insurance, that means that hundreds of thousands of pieces of property could possibly be destroyed in a hurricane and then never rebuilt. Florida could become a wasteland of wrecked homes and businesses. Hundreds of thousands of people could be homeless—meaning either taxes go up to help them, they simply wander the state, or they leave. And since these people own property, they are most likely taxpayers, meaning that, if they depart, the Florida tax base will decline. (On the other hand, if they left, that would decrease the number of non-rich voters, a great way to accomplish what Florida’s voting restrictions failed to do, by bumping up the percentage of probable-G.O.P. voters. Just sayin’.)

Now the availability of private-property insurance has been shrinking these days because the companies have been adjusting policy standards amid the effects of climate change (somehow, companies with a financial interest in the impacts of climate change seem to believe in it, even when the party of business doesn’t). The result http://www.corelogic.com/landing-pages/property-and-casualty-insurance.aspx in coastal states has been moratoriums on new policies, rules forbidding the issuance of policies for properties near the shoreline, or, at the worst, simply pulling out of those states. In other words, private insurance is becoming less reliable for places like Florida, increasing the potential need for an entity like Citizens.

Then . . . Tea Party favorite Governor Scott got into the mix and made the 1.2 million state-sponsored insurance policies the focus of a privatization campaign—a mission involving statements that were about as accurate as his old company’s Medicare filings. Indeed, either Scott was intentionally deceiving voters or he doesn’t understand how insurance works.