Okay, let’s say that’s what they do. No wait, let’s say what they did the last time this exact situation played out. What next?
Do you get a judgment against him that requires he pay every year? What about all of the other residents that decided not to pay?
He did this before: failed to pay, then expected service. So let’s say they put out his house, and billed him $2000. But then next year he fails to pay the $75 subscription fee. Can they take him to court BEFORE his house burns down? Can they force him to pay the $75? Or can they only force him to pay the $2000 after the fact?
No, I have a pretty good sense of justice. I’d love to see this guy brought up on charges. His **negligence **caused the death of his pets. It caused a massive loss to society. It cost his county tax revenue. It nearly killed his son and grandchildren. He put his neighbours at risk. And worst of all he put the fire department into a horribly compromised position, no doubt causing suffering and anguish by the firefighters at the scene.
The guy deserves a lot worse than losing his house. He deserves serious jail time and some pretty hefty fines.
He was the one that started the fire, he was the ones that left the pets trapped inside. He was the one that refused to pay the $75 subscription fee. He was the one that when through all this before, and failed to learn.
How many times did a garbage truck drive by Cranick’s house and refuse to collect his trash for free? Or collect his trash against his will and then bill him for it?
The first was started because Cranick was burning trash. Had the local garbagemen done their ethical duty and removed his trash (and then billed him) Cranick’s house would still be standing (and still without fire protection).
So fuck all those worthless garbagemen that stood around and watched as Cranick burned garbage, week after week. When all they had to do was collect it and then bill him. Shame on them for letting this house burn and animals die.
I’m not seeing the point. This $75 fee is akin to a pre-paid maintenance/insurance contract. Pay $75 up front, then you don’t have to pay the full cost down the road, but you also are out the $75 even if your house doesn’t catch on fire. It is like any other loss mitigation strategy.
So, I’m not seeing why the county should be able to get a judgment next year in advance of his house catching on fire. It probably won’t, so there won’t be any need to collect. So, no, to answer your question, you can only force the man to pay AFTER you have tendered services to him.
Right, there is nothing we can do that will force this guy to pay the $75 before hand. It is his choice to either pay it or refuse it.
And with that said, it is the fire departments right to subsequently refuse to save his house. They don’t have an a la carte style of fire fighting. You either pay the subscription, or you don’t get service.
Good grief gonzo, and you too jt– you either haven’t read the thread or your density approaches that of a neutron star.
This isn’t about punishing Cranick. That might be an enchanting fantasy, but it isn’t what anyone here has proposed. It’s about society’s ability to protect itself from individuals actively hostile to it. This jerk, with malice aforethought, chose to cheat the other members of his community by refusing to pay for a shared service, thus imposing his portion of the burden onto them. He made this craven choice despite his own previous experience with a fire. He did so even though the actual cost to him was barely twenty cents a day. And he did so despite the threat that a fire on his property posed to his neighbors. In other words, he acted like a total asshole.
Your remedy to this would be to provide him with the service anyway, then obligate him to a debt that he will similarly refuse to pay. Great move there! Marvelous solution! So he can keep on having fires, keep on endangering himself and others, and keep on accruing additional financial obligations that will never be paid. Perhaps his heirs will pay it, in the form of discharging a lien, if they decide to sell the property after his passing. But if they keep it, the lien will continue, ad nauseum. And you maintain that this is somehow more just? Fuck that!
The present structure of his local government apparently lacks adequate tools to overcome these obstacles and force a more equitable solution. The poor substitute for an actual solution is to refuse to provide him with the service he clearly has no intention of paying for. As I said upthread, too damn bad for him then. Not the optimal solution, but at least the asshole himself is the only one suffering the consequences.
Elsewhere society has enacted rules which force people like Cranick to pay, and to pay in advance, for the shared services his community provides. This system is called taxation and the public funding of fire brigades. Liberal that I am, I completely support this system. I do so fully aware that this infringes on the ability of Cranick and other cretins like him to “make their own choices” and otherwise exercise their free will. Tough shit for them.
Yes, my remedy would include saving his house and the lives of his animals. If you have trouble with that, you are really a cold hearted SOB.
He was offering the money when they got there. So if it was about the money, the fire dept. won. But keep saying it was about the money does not make it so. They would have gotten the money and more.
It was about teaching him a lesson and making a case to others who may not pay on time. The results were cruel. It was especially cruel to innocent animals. It diminishes everybody involved. It also diminishes you and Macknight who are happy to see the results.
Four animal deaths and a house burned down . That is some lesson. But some people are unable to understand equivalency. The punishment was terrible. The crime, pissing off some bureaucrats. Not paying 75 bucks.
Right. They could mandate the payment through property taxes, but they don’t.
Sure, it is their right to do so, but I thought that the whole point of this thread was debating whether it was the proper thing to do. And I think that Gonzomax is on the right track here.
They could have put out the fire and then billed the homeowner for the costs. If he didn’t pay, they could sue him. But in a political pissing match over $75, they decide to let a man’s house burn to the ground, killing his animals.
People are calling him a freeloader, wanting something for nothing, etc. I don’t agree. He offered to pay full price. It’s no different than me not having full coverage insurance on my car, and if it gets stolen, I am out full value of the car instead of the $250 deductible. I’m not “freeloading” in any way; I have just made a poor loss mitigation choice.
Or a better example, this winter I could purchase a maintenance contract on my home heating unit for a small sum. Or I could chance it and hope it works. If I don’t pay, then when it breaks down, I have to pay the full price, not have my family freeze to death.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/248649/pay-spray-firefighters-watch-home-burns-daniel-foster Even Libertarian publications take offense at the firefighters.
It must be nice to live in a simple world without nuance. But I am sure the firefighters knew there was a dilemma. Firefighters all around are decrying the let it burn choice. Thinking caring people are offended. But stupid and simple little minded people can not grasp the complexity. I pity you.
gonzo, quit being such an ass. You too jt. It isn’t seventy five bucks. It is seventy five bucks a year, every year as the shared burden of providing for the maintenance of a professional fire fighting system.
Seventy five bucks doesn’t compensate even one fireman for the time he spent on Cranick’s fire. It doesn’t purchase so much as the chrome bell on the fire engine. Hell, seventy five bucks probably doesn’t purchase a single fireman’s boot. Offering to pay it now, after the fact, is disingenuous at best and the ugliest kind of open deceit at worst.
And offering to pay “anything, anything at all!” once the fire has taken hold is equally disingenuous. I might consider it if cold hard cash was proffered, in an amount sufficient to actually pay at least the direct expenses (if not the fixed overhead costs and the depreciation on equipment) of the intervention. But I strongly suspect Cranick wasn’t offering cash, just a promise. The county in question already has some sad experience with the follow-through of residents who make such promises. Apparently they could paper the firehouse with worthless promissory notes.
Your asinine “remedy” would only lead to the rest of the community deciding that they too should take advantage of free fire fighting services and refusing to pay their own fire subscriptions. Eventually maybe they’d all share a nice, big community fire, because there would no longer be a fire brigade available to save any, let alone all, of them.
The universe isn’t interested in my “perverted sense of justice”. It is what it is. Cranick made his choice. He refused to subscribe to fire fighting services. The universe took notice. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to draw the universe’s attention. Like Cranick, you may end up fucked. But let’s not blame me for his comeuppance.
Of course you don’t have the option of paying $75 after your house catches on fire anymore than you have the option of buying full coverage auto insurance after you have totaled your car. What I am saying is that he should have been billed for the full market value of putting out the fire.
They have all of their fixed expenses anyways. The marginal cost of putting out one fire would be small by comparison. Bill like a private company would and make it a profitable trip out to the house.
Your slippery slope argument that nobody would pay the $75 doesn’t hold water. If that were the case, then nobody would buy health insurance since you can just go to the emergency room if you are sick, skip out on the bill, and then laugh when the hospital can’t enforce the judgment against you. Why not let a few people die in the waiting room to make sure people start ponying up for health insurance?
In fact, all commerce should grind to a halt and contracts should be outlawed since civil judgments are meaningless.
That’s right, the community he lived in choose not to, twenty years ago. And over the past twenty years Cranick has done this before, and at least 3 houses have burned down (now four).
Again, they didn’t decide anything other than to honour Cranick’s wishes. At some point in the last year, Cranick was asked, “would you like to pay $75 to be included in our coverage area?”
You know what he said? He said no. He said that he didn’t not want to be included, that he was fine with living outside of a service area. As a result, there wasn’t a fire department to put out his fire.
[removed, point already made]
Keep in mind, that this fire department didn’t have a pay-per-call system, ever. It wasn’t an option.
But there are two things I still don’t understand:
Why didn’t Cranick call a different fire station?
Why didn’t all the other stations in all the other surrounding areas, volunteer their services to him? Why all the blame on just this one?
Because this particular fire department was RIGHT THERE fire hose in one hand and limp dick in the other watching his house burn down. He was offering to pay, but the bureaucratic rules wouldn’t allow a “per incident” pay rate.
All terrible reasons to let a house burn to the ground.