I don’t want to get into a strawman vs strawman debate with you, but it’s amusing to note that your two “libertarian” solutions are anti-libertarian.
Rather than a round of useless rejoinders on the definition of “libertarian” can we agree that the “libertarian” instinct that led to the Incident of Cranick’s Folly went too far? I’ll be happy if you can find it in your heart to answer “Yes” to that; and we can then agree to disagree on whether “libertarianism” is the solution to America’s woes, or rather the symbol of its increasing political problems.
Crannick apparently paid $463 last year in property taxes. The county will lose out on tax revenue because of this, assuming a reassessment is done.
I don’t see how this affects the South Fulton FD and their policy, which apparently comes directly from South Fulton City Council representing the residents of the municipality of South Fulton, who are tired of people moving out to the county to escape their evil municipal property taxes and then demanding the same level of services, for which they’re no longer paying.
So, how do you expect the fire chief to fund services to people in the county, when those people have collectively and individually decided not to pay for the services?
I have to agree that the situation in the OP is stupid, but using it to attack libertarian or anarcho-capitalist philosophy is equally stupid. Yes, the Cranicks in the OP deserved to get their house burned to the ground for being freeloaders, but the fact remains that not putting out the fire posed real danger to the lives and property of others in the neighborhood. Refusing to put the fire out potentially put the rest who did pay at risk, and so it makes no sense to potentially punish them more because of one freeloader.
IMO, the correct action would have been to have put out the fire and then have billed them for the service. At worst, since they were present, they could have formed a quick agreement on the spot and filed a suit if they didn’t follow through.
That said, I’m okay with taxes being used to fund these sorts of services so as to avoid these sorts of situations. That said, I still think a privately funded fire insurance would have served exactly the same purpose. Akin to how I have uninsured motorist insurance, in the event that I get in an accident and the other driver is fully at fault but uninsured, then that same sort of coverage would have protected the neighbors, and then they could pursue the freeloaders. Hell, that sort of social pressure from being the one person in the neighborhood without coverage, forcing the responsible owners to pay the uninsured fee, would probably be enough right there.
So now tax payers are held hostage but the possibility that this guy might become a criminal after his house burns down? I really hate this argument.
The guy had a choice. He made his choice. The fire department abided by that choice.
What sort of fucked up system establishes that the fire department owes this guy anything? If he wanted the fire department to save his house, all he had to do was pay the $75. He choose not to.
Again I’m going to ask, does Allstate/Geico/Statefarm owe this guy an insurance payout as well?
No it didn’t. The fire department protected the neighbour who paid his fees.
No, they couldn’t. 75% of the municipality of South Fulton FD’s calls are to the rural area; they collect after-the-fact payments in less than 50% of the cases. It’s not just “he might not pay”, it’s “most of those rural folks who don’t pay the fee and then call us saying ‘I’ll pay anything, just put out the fire!’, don’t pay.”
Le Jacquelope and Der Trihs, assuming this guy doesn’t have home owners insurance (or has failed to pay his policy), do insurance companies owe him any money?
If I do pay for fire protection, I want the fire department to put out the fire in the fastest and most effective way possible. Fighting it over there before it gets over here means they’ll be fighting a smaller fire, and my house is less likely to get burnt down if something goes wrong.
It’s the same as herd immunity: even if you are vaccinated, you’re still safer if the disease isn’t given the freedom to become supercritical.
It’s not our fault if you can’t tell the difference between a libertarian and an anarchist.
No. That is part of the risk profile that his neighbours need to consider. They CHOOSE to live in a neighbourhood that allows opt-out fire protection, they choose to live next door to a guy who opted out. That’s part of their neighbourhood, and part of the “cost” of living there, and they know that (or should know that). If it was important to them, they should have (a) made sure he had coverage, and (b) paid for his coverage realizing he opted out.
I realize that’s a rather stupid way of approaching it. Which is the point here. Opt-out is stupid, it doesn’t work, and as evidence we have established a case where even Sam Stone sides with socialism.
If this is really the case, I don’t see why they’re still offering the service to the rural area at all. Like I said above: they’re really not doing anyone a favor by making this a personal subscription system that’s actually kept up by taxation somewhere else - if it was clear to the idiots in the rural district that there would not be any fire department at all for anyone, how long do you think it’d them to decide that maybe setting up their own tax-funded system (or their own privatized system, for that matter) would be worth it? Right now they - all of them, even the ones that do pay the $75/year - are just leaching off the city.
I suspect the neighbor’s preference would have been to not have his house catch on fire in the first place, though.
But that’s justa defect in the way the system is administered. The county and the jurisdiction agreeing to provide fire service could have set it up so that fire victims who had not paid the service fee got assessed some large amount for the costs of the response, with a lien put on their property if they did not pay.
This is, by the way, how property taxes work. If a homeowner doesn’t pay, the jurisdiction puts a tax lien on the property.
So the FD’s revenue is tied up in liens and collections actions instead of being available to properly equip and fund themselves. Remember, less than 50% of the cases where they try to collect afterwards are successful.
Is it impossible to have the fire department bring an invoice for the cost of putting out the fire + 20%?
Whether or not libertarians think fire protection by the government is good, this example falsifies the common contention that we don’t need regulation because no person would be so stupid as to not do the things regulations handle - such as take unproven drugs, go without fire protection, or conduct a trading policy which puts their company and the world economy at risk.
My point is that the losses will get socialized somewhere down the line. In this case it will be socialized at the county level.
What you’re referring to is related to the parable of the broken window. But I believe the parable goes against you on this, not for you.
“It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.”
In other words, if the resident had not had a house to replace, he would, perhaps, employed his money in some other way which this fire has prevented.
Allow me to refer to that which is unseen here:
He’ll probably still be there costing them money in other ways like using public roads and building up garbage at some other place. Unless he’s now a homeless drifter which means he’s also costing sales taxes and other taxable economic activity.
:eek:
Going by that logic we should burn everyone’s house down every year.
Ah yes, the proveribal glazier.
In this economy? Really? More than likely it’ll just sit there as an empty lot. Especially if his insurance will not cover it, which is a likely scenario. Housing construction and sales aren’t exactly brisk, you know. More of that unseen thing.
Saying that a house burning down is a great thing for the local community isn’t the sturdiest argument ever. Just sayin’.
Property taxes outside of an incorporated city are typically pretty damn low. These guys don’t have city water service, they have a well and septic tank. They don’t get trash pickup, they either burn it, bury it, or pay someone to haul it away. So losing the house here is not a huge hit to the city. Plus, he’s got a trailer on the property now so there is some assessable value, and he claims he is going to get insurance to rebuild the house.
Also, the fire spread to the neighbor’s PROPERTY LINE, not the house. The firefighters sprayed water on the fenceline to keep the fire from spreading to neighboring properties. These houses are not in a city center or even a typical McMansion subdivision where you can count your neighbor’s eyebrow hairs from your kitchen…these are rural properties on big pieces of land outside of the sity proper.
Right, which is he should have paid for his neighbour’s coverage, or why the fire department should have told him, “your neighbour doesn’t pay, so your fee is $150.”
With freedom comes responsibility.
Remember that the neighbours are free to live where ever they choose, that’s the beauty of living in America. If they were each assigned a parcel of land allotted to them by the government you might have a case.
HA, I can just read how that would play out in the news. “Mr Cranick’s house tragically burned to the ground destroying everything he owned, and NOW the evil government his coming after him for the cost of the fire crew that failed to stop the fire.”
Like I said before, his house had already caught on fire, and I assume we agree that wasn’t the fire department’s (government’s) fault right? The fire department may not have even been able to save it. How much you wanna bet he’d refuse to pay based on that?!
And even better, I’m sure this asshole would file a lawsuit, both claiming that the department went against his wishes, AND that their incompetence failed to save his house. God Bless America.
As an aside, I went through training to be a volunteer firefighter. I was really excited to smash stuff, but instead we spent an entire day being lectured about when and where it’s appropriate to smash things–because people we seek financial retribution!
Okay, so why does the fire department owe him anything, but an insurance agency doesn’t?
As a licensed agent, what would you say to a guy that called up after not paying his policy, and demand you pay benefits? Do you not see that as the same thing?
Why is it the fire department owes this guy anything?
Blaming this on a ‘libertarian instinct’, and using that as a hammer against libertarianism is like pointing to the jailing of a dissident in Iran, claiming that it’s an example of a ‘governmental instinct’, and using that to criticize Obamacare. It’s a great big damned non-sequitur.
Libertarians are not anarchists. In fact, the difference between libertarians and Anarchists is that libertarians believe government is responsible for maintaining civil society, and almost all libertarians would agree that that includes government handling the police, courts of law, the military, and a certain amount of public infrastructure. The overwhelming majority of libertarians would also include essential services like fire protection and sanitation, although their bias would be towards finding a way to include as much personal choice and private action as possible while still maintaining effective services.
A majority of libertarians, myself included, also recognize that there are cases where a market can’t function, and that the proper role of government is to correct for market failures. That includes correcting for externalities, cases of fixed resource scarcity (maintaining public access to the only bridge off an island, for example), and other market failures.
Those libertarians who believe in privatized fire services would probably argue that in an ideal world there would be free-market incentives to behave correctly. For example, in a world of voluntary for-profit fire protection, no one is going to lend you money for a house unless you show proof of fire insurance. And no insurance company is going to give you fire insurance unless you pay for fire protection. In fact, you’d probably wind up with a situation in which fire protection is underwritten by consortiums of insurance companies protecting their own assets, much like insurance companies pay for UL approvals and fund Underwriter’s Laboratories.
But we don’t live in that world, so trying to make fire protection voluntary with none of the free-market controls in place to make voluntary fire protection work is just silly.
Libertarians also don’t generally have a problem with neighborhood zoning laws, given that you have a choice of which neighborhood you choose to live in. So in a libertarian world there would be nothing stopping a neighborhood from demanding that everyone in it pay into a fire protection fund which is then used to pay for blanket fire protection for the entire community. In fact, that would by far be the most likely result in a libertarian world. I don’t want to live next to someone who doesn’t have fire protection, so when choosing a neighborhood to live in, I’m going to pick one which requires all residents to pay into the fire protection fund.
And once we have that, and we have private fire services contracting out to entire neighborhoods, I can also see how the market would drive them to be efficient by signing agreements between neighborhoods to share fire services in the case of extreme fire events so that a minimum level of regular services are maintained within each neighborhood. So you can imagine a network of private fire departments with agreements to help each other out in emergencies, but each with a primary responsibility to the community it’s locatd within, and universal fire protection still being available.
It might look pretty much like what exists now, except that fire stations would be subject to competition and would be forced to innovate, contain costs, and be as efficient as possible. That doesn’t sound like a horrible outcome to me.
But how do you get there? The transition would be very hard to do if you’re not starting from the ground up and allowing incentives to build out the system from scratch. Maybe if someone develops a new libertarian city in the future they can give it a try.
