The government doesn’t have the constitutional right to force people to pay for things they don’t want. The founding fathers said nothing about fire protection.
If it’s a “tax” that just means rich people will pay for it all, and poor people won’t, but both will get the same crappy watered down coverage. When the crappy underfunded system is shown to fail, we’ll have to make the rich pay more, or run deficits.
2-b. If we tax the rich we’ll kill out golden geese. The rich will move to Caribbean Islands where they are free to chose the fire services they want. Then we’ll lose out on all that tax revenue.
2-c. If you burden businesses with taxes and regulations, they won’t hire people or expand so your GDP will shrink along with your tax revenue.
Resources are limited. If it’s something people want, they’ll pay.
If we allow socialized fire services, we’ll have to allow socialized everything, then we’ll be socialist. This is just another step down a slippery slope to communism. You don’t want communism do you?
If you remove the direct cost to the consumer they won’t respect it. It makes an incentive to start fires, since after all someone else is paying for it. You end up with old people calling every time their cat is in a tree. Lonely housewives will call for company. People will be reckless with their candles and oily rags. The financial cost is a disincentive to starting fires.
without disincentives, fire houses will be over burdened, and as a result quality will suffer.
the government sucks at running things, do you really want the government running your firefighting services? look at how bad public schools and public roads are. you really want your fire house to end up like that?
if you give the government control over the cost, they’ll want to make demands. first they’ll insist you change the battery in your smoke detector, then they’ll demand that you buy a fire extinguisher. before long they’ll be an entire “fire code” and an overpaid bureaucrat going around fining people for not complying.
cite: EUROPE! or Cuba, I forget which.
Did you just get here? This is how it’s always been.
Ah, I did not know these facts. Good points, but I still think it’s a shame to lose the house because the county government fobbed responsibility off onto optional uses of city services.
Why do you assume an abdication of responsibility by the government when it’s the people in that county who have chosen not to pay for said services? That’s like a parent who consistently votes against school levies bitching because the school is falling apart.
Has anyone stopped to consider why a county might not have the same emergency fire response service that you would typically find in a municipality? I bet it’s just a little more complicated than “we don’t want to pay high taxes.” One of the problems with a county is that the rural areas are not only sparsely populated but they are rather spread out as well. Obion County, where South Fulton is located, has a population of 32,000 spread out over 555 square miles. Contrast that with nearby (relatively) Memphis which has 67,000 people within 313 square miles.
So if your the county government and you want to build a county wide fire department where do you put it? You’re not going to put it in the municipalities even though they have the most people because they already have their own fire departments. It’ll be hard to build the fire department in a central location that can service the entire county because of it’s sparse and dispersed population. Build more than one fire station? Well, does the county have the tax base to support this? Probably not.
Emergency services are a big problem in a lot of rural America. It’s not because people don’t want to pay taxes it’s because there’s a budget problem.
It does so all the time, and couldn’t function without doing so.
Garbage. That’s just an excuse the rich use to try to weasel out of paying anything to keep up the society they are leeching off of. They’d never leave; no other country would give them the kind of luxury and near worship America does.
Please. Without regulations they’ll kill people right and left and treat their workers as near slaves. And without taxes the country collapses.
No, demonstrably they won’t.
A silly argument, this has nothing to do with communism.
No, making it a fee based setup like this is an incentive for the fire department to start fires to drum up business. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it turned out this fire was an example of arson by the fire department, to spread terror and intimidate more people into paying.
No, as a for profit setup quality will suffer because like all insurance type arrangements they make money by doing as poor a job as possible.
They are better than private businesses at some things, including running a fire department. After all, that’s why we switched from for profit fire departments in the first place.
No, it hasn’t been. This is a throwback to a century or more ago.
:rolleyes: Your point is valid in general, but the cost of response is still closer to $75 than to $75,000. Fire Trucks are heavy, but diesel’s not all that expensive. They could set up a policy that saves the property while costing the owners a moderately large amount of money.
Wow, if only there were some institution with the power to make “rules” that coerce behavior for the sake of a greater good, & the authority to collect funds from the community against their will for their own good. :rolleyes:
Yep, the problem here is systemic. Regardless of the deadbeat nature of the Cranicks, in a larger sense this case is indeed an indictment of small-government theory.
You’ve never heard the word “omission” have you? As in “act of omission”? (Hint: It’s not the same as “emission.”)
In this county, the city fire department can do it for $75 per house. What is stopping the county from reaching an agreement with the city that it will tax everyone a bit less than $75 per house, and pay the tax to the city for fire protection? That sounds like a bargain to me.
You’re right. He acted rationally*–not idiotically–*& then things went south. The FD reacted rationally in this case, thinking about all the deadbeats out there.
This is what you’re missing: All of them behaved sensibly, given their own understanding of the situation, and given the system as set up. That’s why the system is at fault. This is what small-government planning gets us.
Blaming the FD for letting his house burn, or Cranick for not paying, is missing the point. We need a system wherein there is not a strong rational incentive to risk nor to cause massive property damage. That means we should be leery of a low-tax, low-service, fee-based, heavily privatized public service régime. And because populist democracy tends to neglect serious public safety planning in favor of short-term “advantage” in the form of tax cuts, that also means that we need rule by experts who are concerned with the popular welfare, not the public’s wishes.
Salus populi suprema lex esto, not Vox populi vox dei.
This is exactly why I believe in direct public funding of medical care. Further, such should be done against the wishes of the people, because the people are too stupid or too rationally ignorant to comprehend or even to consider what is in the public good.
All this does is convince me more that democracy is a mistake & should be abolished, inshallah.
I agree with you on solutions, Sam, but the Yank right-wing that you typically defend makes these kinds of foolish arrangements all the time, & justifies it because “private is always better than public.” And it’s very popular. Yanks really are too stupid to have a democracy; we need a Tsar to rule over us because we can’t or won’t take care of ourselves.
I don’t know what “this” county is. If you’re referring to Obion County this isn’t the case. The South Fulton FD only operates their rural subscription rates within a 5 mile radius of the municipality and not with the entire county. If you’re referring to another county, well, I can’t really answer that. I can’t even really answer why they don’t do it in Obion County. Counties, like states, have different demographics, geography, and other factors that might require a different approach to solving similar problems. What works in Tarrent County, Texas or Dallas County, Arkansas might not work so well in Obion County Tennessee. I’m simply pointing out the possibilities that fire service isn’t so great for reasons other than tax avoidance.
A nice solution which I would consider quite reasonable if it were possible to get blood from a stone. There are limits to this sort of propertarianism. What if the Cranicks had died & all their property was lost or claimed by other creditors? All the more so in a society with neither guaranteed income nor legal indentured servitude, where there may be no way to make the negligent party pay even if he survives & is debt-free.
Well, actually…no. Cranick didn’t act rationally, he acted stupidly. A homeowner has no excuse for leaving his home without fire fighting services when it only costs him $75 annually to secure it. I have no sympathy for this guy.
But this gets to one of the main problems with libertarians: they tend to make dubious assumptions about human behavior. They think “OF COURSE nobody would willingly go without fire department protection. Take away the government and the individual citizens acting in their own interest will produce a collectively positive result.” Well, guess what? People aren’t always rational. Many are quite stupid and short-sighted. And the ability of individuals to mitigate the poor decision making of their neighbors is subject to various constraints, including access to information (people in this thread seem to assume that anyone in the community could have found out or cared to find out whether Cranick had paid his annual fee).
I’m actually not opposed to the system in place in Obion Co., TN, given the sparse population and limited resources available. But if you’re advocating small government (not you personally), you’re necessarily accepting that certain people will inevitably make bad choices that they have to suffer the consequences for, even if the consequences are dire and pitiable. If you believe this is the way things should be, don’t try to gloss over the negatives with some half-assed “no true Scotsman” argument.
You’re not talking about this thread, right? Because they did have the budget to bring their firetruck right to the Cranick’s house, but declined to water his house since he’d not paid the $75 fee.
(And, risking redundancy, be aware I’m neither condemning the fire department nor condoning the Cranick’s delinquency. I’m condemning the hyper-libertarian mindset that led to this and that makes America the laughing-stock of the Western world.)
I don’t think so. What the department did was very foolish, and if kept up borders on the suicidal. Who do you think would end up the scapegoat if neglecting a fire the way they did this one lets it get out control? And as I said, this is practically begging for someone to lose it and start killing fire fighters. We could very easily have been talking about “the Cranick mass shooting” today.
Duh. “In a libertarian world.” A different universe with different people with different instincts.
Right, because no one in the perfect libertarian world ever forgets anything. All your brains are perfect. Oh, if only those stupid liberals who want things would all be destroyed by their own imperfection, that you & yours could inherit the earth & make it perfect & Godly!
Of course, when you get older & start forgetting things, you’ll become a “liberal” too. :eek:
[/snark] And I forgot this is not the Pit.
Actually, no, they had no way to know that. Why do all of these libertarians assume that we all know everything & are up in each others’ business? Libertarian solutions don’t work because no one has complete information.
People, if they are conscious & free, act rationally based on their understanding of the situation. This is a “by definition” thing in macroeconomics. To an economist, saying someone acted irrationally & stupidly, & thus deserve their poor outcome, is just after-the-fact moralizing & excuse-making.
