Card carrying liberal here, retired hippy and all that.
Yes it is all about choices. The community made a choice, which was to not provide fire services directly but to contract with a neighboring municipality to provide those services on a paid subscription basis. This isn’t necessarily a crazy choice. We have here a rural county with low population and presumably few fires. Maintaining a fire house with actual fire equipment and training of firemen (salaried or volunteer) to provide for a rare need might reasonably be viewed as unnecessary duplication (even if the cost per taxpayer was low) when the municipality next door has excess capacity (equipment sitting around, not too many fires to fight) and is happy to accept additional revenue from subscription fees.
The next relevant choice was made by Cranick. He chose to not avail himself of the voluntary subscription service. He made this choice despite his own sad experience with the possibility of fire on his property. He apparently, by his own statements, believed that he would be provided this service anyway. Whether he was a craven freeloading asshole or merely someone unable to rationally analyze risk / benefit scenarios is a fun discussion, but does nothing to change the situation. Fact was, he gambled and lost. He put his money on red too often, and this time the ball fell on black. Too bad for him that his choice turned out badly.
The Municipal fire department also made a choice. When informed that a non-subscriber had a fire, they chose to remain in their firehouse. This seems a perfectly reasonable decision. Why should this municipal fire department mobilize and roll out, incurring expenses and potentially endangering themselves (by traffic accident if nothing else), merely because some non-customer resident of their county had a fire? Whatever your business goods or services may be, I’m pretty certain you do not rush out to provide them to every non-customer who enters your county. They, like you, remained in their business office / firehouse awaiting the possibility of serving an actual customer.
And sure enough, they got a call from a paid subscriber, that being Cranick’s neighbor. They quite properly made the further decision to roll out and protect his property from fire which apparently they did in a professional manner. And while they were there, they also quite professionally investigated the possibility of danger to human life at Cranick’s house. Determining that there was none, they maintained their professional position, protecting the property of their paid subscriber, until the danger from fire was past. This, of course, coincided with the final burn-down of Cranick’s house. Whereupon they left.
I am not seeing any wrongdoing on the part of the fire department here. Nor on the part of the county officials who put this system in place. Nor on the part of the county voters who ultimately ratified the system by re-electing those officials. The only fault here is that of Cranick, who made a choice that was arguably ______ (unfortunate; sad; bad; stupid; moronic; craven; acquisitive; insensitive; asshole-ish…. You pick). And the only one who directly lost was-- Cranick. All is in balance, the world is in harmony.
Now, my hippy dippy socialist side sees a greater “societal loss” here, in that the entire community is lessened by the value of Cranick’s home, possessions, and even his very residence in that community. And so I too would argue that a higher good would have been served if the county in question did not allow the choices above. A county fire department supported by a mandatory tax base would have prevented Cranick’s loss, and the societal loss as well. (We suppose so, anyway, although we do not really know how successful fire suppression of a burning trailer would have been. But that’s not been the issue in contention.) And I’m glad that most communities in the First World embrace this socialist philosophy. I suspect that Fulton County will likely move somewhat in this direction now too. Cranick will then have to move somewhere else to exercise his “choices”.
And maybe he should get himself a kitten.
And somebody pass the bong. It isn’t a hippy sharing circle without a bong.