If we'd be talking paperclips vs paperclips would that be morally similar? Or is the monetary value of houses somehow large enough to justify a similarity to human lives?
Even so, none of those things matter (photos, computer files, etc) when you balance them with a human life.
It would be more accurate to say 'People are more emotionally attached to people than houses'.
And then there are all the "houses" built from salvaged materials in poor countries. Not sure if you'd want to count those. A person living in such a structure would still be considered homeless in many places.
Maybe only to the people involved, but it's likely that a fairly accurate dollar value could still be assigned to the loss.
I feel that the central thesis of your comment that the government is this faceless entity that has decided through force to violate lives and is thereby reprehensible to be something that's counter to the facts of the matter and the case at hand.
From the article, it quickly becomes clear that they were trying to avoid catastrophic failure by diverting water to a historic food plain;
> “If we don’t begin releasing now, the volume of uncontrolled water around the dams will be higher,” Colonel Lars Zetterstrom, the Corps’ Galveston district commander, was quoted as saying. “It’s going to be better to release the water through the gates directly into Buffalo Bayou.” The danger was that the water would flow uncontrolled into homes located upstream from the reservoir, crest the reservoir walls downstream, or crack a section of the Barker dam that was under repair. Had either dam failed, the Houston Chronicle later wrote, West Houston would have been left with “a week of corpses by the mile.”
In one cases, the failure would have been sudden and would have killed an unforeseeably large number of people. In another, they could act to preserve lives, but damage property that can be later rebuilt. They chose the latter, and I believe this was the most moral and correct response to the situation at hand.
Why aren't these people heroes for making this call? The Government in this case acted exactly as it should; as an entity that is meant to be representative of and beholden to its citizens and chose an action that preserved the lives of citizens over arbitrary property value that can be repaid through other means.
There is no version of this scenario that plays out well for anyone at all, but the fact that they minimized harm while reducing the risk of catastrophic failure shows that the system does work as intended. After all, homes can be rebuilt, but as far as I can tell, people can't be brought back from the dead.
What makes you think that any kind of property is worth as much as a human life?
If you like this, then you should also support eminent domain, where the government can take whatever it wants to make the neighborhood better.
It definitely irks me when people say "oh they're just energy sector republicans", as if political disagreements makes anyone less deserving of rights under the law. Equality, people, is something you must enforce ESPECIALLY when you don't like the person receiving equality. This was a true thing to say to racists in the past, and to republican haters of the present.
To really get side-tracked: Is it okay to hate haters? Are you justified to do to them what they do? No, I would say love your enemy, if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. Your gifts will be like hot coals on his head.