Some of the people flooded out of the Wisconsin hamlet of Gays Mills aren’t ready to give up. Their homes are ruined, their keepsakes gone, their town needs dousing with bleach. Yet one woman whose house was still submerged said, “More than ever, I want to live here.”

Does this sound familiar — like, say, the devotion inspired by a certain half-empty Southern city ruined by Hurricane Katrina? Much differs between the ongoing political totem that is New Orleans and a soon-again-to-be-obscure village made regionally infamous by a week of August storms. What unites them is the way the refugee’s longing to rebuild, even if unwise, is likely to be indulged.

To be fair, the Gays Mills woman was flexible: She was among those who felt the town could be moved a little farther from the Kickapoo River, since it’s been flooded badly before, in 1993 and 1978. A neighboring village, Soldiers Grove, moved uphill by 1983. It stayed dry this time.

We’re not talking far. The steep valley wall is right at Gays Mills’ edge. On top is land not much used but for hay and orchards. Still, “we need to keep Main Street intact,” a factory owner said. A baker feared moving upward would ruin the small-town feel, and another refugee said rebuilding above the mildew line “would kill the soul of this city.”

If by “soul,” you mean a periodic coating of decaying organic matter, then, yes, moving would do that. That’s bad? Hardly. I’ll tell you what’s bad: An emotion-driven approach to disasters that, by preserving dangerous places, endangers the people drawn back into them. We see this in the national imperative to reconstitute New Orleans, come hell or absolutely certain high water. We see it in Gays Mills’ reluctance to move a half mile.

I know: These are adults. If the baker wants that small-town feel and doesn’t mind the occasional small-lost-continent-of-Atlantis feel, they’re his wholewheat hamburger buns on the line.

Only this: These sentiments came at a town meeting last week with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is preparing to make good what insurers won’t. Thus, you’re complicit.

It’s your money that will rebuild homes; it’s your money that will subsidize business fix-up loans. Not to begrudge anyone aid after he flees with nothing but what he’s wearing. It’s good for us to help. One can’t even fault the distraught and displaced for rash talk.

But what they need as much as a bowl of warm soup is for someone to say that relief is one thing while rebuilding is another, and that maybe rebuilding ought not to be done with taxpayers’ money in hydraulically unreasonable places. They need a federal government with a spine. Instead, they’ll get sentiment armed with a checkbook.

So far, Washington’s sent $127 billion to fix up Katrina’s Gulf Coast damage. Even accounting for inflation, that’s more than the Marshall Plan spent to fix Europe. Yet New Orleans is still half-empty, the murder rate is nearly twice that of Detroit, and the same incompetent local leadership is largely in place.

The feds have spent $7 billion on your behalf rebuilding New Orleans’ levees — higher, stronger, but still not enough to handle an actual strike by a truly big hurricane, instead of a sideswipe by a category three. Meanwhile, much of the land due for rebuilding remains a dozen or more feet below sea level. These are not acts of federal stinginess. They’re signs of a country too politically cowed to say it won’t pay billions to rebuild dysfunction. So, if a radically changed New Orleans is unthinkable, think instead of a radically changed Gays Mills. This illustrates the issue without all the psychodrama.

Gays Mills wasn’t actually below river level, but most people there didn’t have flood insurance. It’s too costly. Naturally: Insurance is for the unpredictable and unlikely. Floods are neither when you’re built on the silt plain in a narrow valley downstream from flash-flooding creeks in a climate given to summer downpours. The village seal might as well have included an anvil hanging by a string.

And why pay for flood insurance when disaster aid will be on hand? Gays Mills will receive the kindness of strangers via FEMA.

That’s because our polity can’t say no. Three decades after President Reagan supposedly brought in the age of mean, we’re still suckers for people who put themselves in danger. Back in the kindhearted ol’ New Deal, the feds forcibly moved towns for nothing more than make-work TVA reservoirs.

Now, we can’t manage to tell a village that it can rebuild with our money only if it does so farther up the bluff. We won’t demand that New Orleans, as long as its low parts are empty, at least put down enough fill to start above river level. We won’t let flood-insurance rates keep its refugees settled dryly in Houston. We won’t be mean even when that’s the kindest course.

Instead, we’re spending madly to once again let people picnic in the middle of fate’s freeway. Rebuilt levees are a certain sign that the next time water flows downhill into New Orleans’ living rooms, we’ll offer another Live-in-a-Marsh Plan. We can’t say no to Gays Mills, slimed-up home to 607 future flood victims, and we certainly can’t to the cultural capital of southern dissipation. Too timid to take risk seriously, we’re spending our compassion on dangerous geography, a cruelty to those we pay to rebuild in it.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.