Here’s an interesting question about the proper scope of government arising from Obion County, Tennessee. The county does not have its own fire department, and instead relies on the fire protection services of the nearby City of Fulton. But there’s a catch: The City of Fulton does not automatically serve residents of the county. If Obion County residents want to be protected by the City of Fulton Fire Department, they need to pay a $75 fee to the City.
Obion County resident Gene Cranick decided not to pay the $75 fee, and then he set a fire in his backyard in two large barrels. The fire began to spread, and he called 911. The 911 operator told him that because he hadn’t paid the fee, the fire department would not respond. Cranick’s wife told the 911 operator that she would be willing to pay “whatever the cost” to hire the Fire Department to put out the fire, but was told that this was not an option. The Fire Department did not come out until the fire spread to a neighbor’s yard — the neighbor had paid the fee — and the firemen put out the neighbor’s fire but not Cranick’s.
According to press reports, the community is outraged that the Fire Department didn’t respond to Cranick’s call and save his house. But it seems to me that if you’re going to make an insurance program optional, the way to get the service is to pay the fee. It doesn’t make much sense to decline to pay for a service and then be upset when it isn’t provided to you.
Over at The Corner, Daniel Foster finds it objectionable that the Fire Department didn’t agree to individually contract with the Cranicks to provide the service when Mrs. Cranick said over the phone that they would pay for the service “whatever the cost.” But I don’t know how the city is supposed to contract individually with the Cranicks while their house is burning down. Is the city supposed to treat Mrs. Cranick’s statement that she would be willing to pay as the acceptance of a contract, at whatever the cost ends up being? At whatever the city wants to charge? And what if the Cranicks don’t have the money to pay the actual cost of the firefighters coming out and putting out the fire?
Of course, one obvious solution is to make the service mandatory: Require homeowners to pay the $75 as a mandatory tax, and then you don’t have to worry about whether any particular house is covered and the fire department always has to respond. But that choice is up to the people of Obion County, of course.
So what do you think: Should the County require all its residents to pay the free and receive coverage? Alternatively, should the county require the Fire Department to contract with individuals in emergencies if they need the fire department’s services but did not pay the fee? Or is the current system the best alternative?
John A. Fleming says:
A few more refuseniks having well-publicized house burn-downs, and the problem will solve itself. Either the residents of Obion County will organize a volunteer fire department and get ‘er done, or all the refuseniks will pay up (especially since their insurance companies will refuse to pay for the loss). For Mr. Cranik, he can take consolation that he has taught his neighbors how not to behave.
October 4, 2010, 1:11 pmDr. K says:
He made a choice.
He chose poorly. Or stupidly.
You pick.
October 4, 2010, 1:12 pmruuffles says:
I’d have a wee bit more sympathy if it were due to reasons outside of his control (lightning, arson, etc) but that’s just hilarious. Usually people who forgo insurance (most likely because they can’t afford it, unlike this guy) tend to be more cautious, not less.
October 4, 2010, 1:14 pmSigivald says:
What’s hilarious about a burn barrel?
They’re commonplace in rural and semi-rural areas for disposal of leaves and lawn debris.
That’s not being “less cautious” than normal, after all.
October 4, 2010, 1:17 pmDjDiverDan says:
Hey, I’m with the City of Fulton here – the Crannick’s were given the option of paying the annual fee, and voluntarily chose not to. Just like Fire Insurance – if you don’t buy the insurance, you have expressed an intent to assume the risk. Now if only the Federal Government would adopt the same philosophy with their Flood Insurance Program; every year, millions of people in flood prone areas, like New Orleans, along the Mississippi River, along tributaries like the Missouri, the Des Moines River, the Illinois and Ohio Rivers, are all given the option to purchase flood insurance; every year, millions make the voluntary decision not to pay for the insurance; every year, there is a flood somewhere, and every year, taxpayers end up bailing out those who chose to take their chances with “Disaster Area Relief Grants.” So, when will the Federal Government start acting like the City of Fulton and forcing people to accept the responsibility for their own decisions?
October 4, 2010, 1:17 pmDay Break says:
If someone needed rescue from the fire would the fire department show up?
October 4, 2010, 1:18 pmhazemyth says:
Doesn’t this story also raise the question about whether or not properties can be thus compartmentalized? I mean, the fire spread to the adjacent property… Did the firefighters leave, as soon as the fire was reported, in anticipation of such an eventuality? Or did they wait until the fire had already spread (and some damage had been done)? What if the fire spread to the point that it rampaged out of control, spreading to multiple properties or adjacent forest or some such?
And of course, we need to ask ourselves the hypothetical of what the firefighters would have and should have done if a life had been in jeopardy on an uninsured property… [Edit: Oops, Day Break beat me...]
October 4, 2010, 1:18 pmCarter says:
This scenario has interesting implications for the debate over the individual mandate provision of the health care reform legislation. The basic logic of proponents of that provision is that when push comes to shove, society will be too soft hearted and give emergency care to people like Gene Cranick who opted not to get insurance. I’m not saying it’s good or bad reasoning, but it’s just an interesting analogy.
October 4, 2010, 1:20 pmJohnF says:
The problem is that fires spread–as this one did. So it’s all well and good that the non “insured” guy’s house burns up, but not so good that the neighbor’s does.
This is, to me, the main reason why they should make the fee a tax of the sort most of the rest of us pay in our communities.
If it was just a bunch of farmsteads, with no risks to neighbors, my view would be different.
But, as they used to say, it’s a free country, and people can organize themselves as they wish.
October 4, 2010, 1:20 pmJoe says:
I support the decision of the fire department and the decision of the guy to forgo fire protection. I don’t think there is any need to make fire protection mandatory to fix the “problem.” There is no problem. These folks made a choice to forgo protection. On the percentages, it was probably a smart choice, but now you have to accept the consequences of that choice. No gov’t aide and not “fix.” Just let this guy deal with it on his own.
October 4, 2010, 1:21 pmd-berg says:
It’s difficult to trust someone to pay a significant amount of money (whatever the cost) after they could not spare $75, so the city should be cautious in accepting this alleged contract offer. Besides, 911 operator most certainly is not granted authority to make such a contract over the phone and it is logistically difficult to make someone with such authority available quickly enough. But if the city wants to make such ad-hoc contracts possible in the future, they can make such arrangements. Until that moment, they failed to pay upfront, they see their house burn.
October 4, 2010, 1:21 pmCasual Peruser says:
Clearly Mr. Cranick needed to convince the town that his house was too big to burn. I hear that’s the best way to get the government to cover your losses after you’ve assumed irrational amounts of risk.
October 4, 2010, 1:24 pmPaul says:
I am surprised that it is not a requirement of his insurance company – or in the alternative that the insurance is not more than $75 more expensive per year. I would guess that the insurance company was not aware of the situation (as it is somewhat unusual.
October 4, 2010, 1:24 pmAs long as there were no lives at stake I have no problem with the fire department’s response. If there were they should come and save the life but be free to walk away from the property damage.
Also – can the neighbor come after him for the damages to their house?
Joe says:
I don’t see what difference it would make if there was a need for an EMT. Does the county also contract for EMT service? If so then, no pay – no service. These people are adults let them have the freedom to make bad choices.
As for neighboring property, it looks like it all worked out just fine. Once the fire hit a property that pays for service, service was provided. I am sure that the owner of the property that was covered will bring a negligence suit against the non-covered guy and win. And he should, that is how these issues should be settled – private enforcement, not gov’t mandate.
October 4, 2010, 1:26 pmLucia says:
I’ve lived in similar communities where paying for fire coverage was free. My understanding is the policy was if you don’t pay, the fire department doens’t come when you call.
The difficulties in figuring out what the uninsured Cranick’s should pay are greater than your post suggest. If the negotion with 911 went as you reported, is “whatever the cost”, the incremental costs of gasoline, fireman salary during the event, and materials used? Or, do we calculate like this:
Recognize the fire department has fixed annual costs like fireman salaries, benfits, food they eat while in the firestation on duty, insurance for the trucks, costs of public awareness campaigns etc. All these are paid out of the $75 fee. Then, figure out how many fires the department puts out a year. Say that’s 10 fires. Is “whatever it costs” 1/10th the total cost of running the fire department that year?
Do we put a surcharge on that if their fire was bigger than others and required bringing in more trucks? Do we give them a discount if their fire was smaller?
If we go with incremental cost, what happens if a fireman dies or becomes disabled?
October 4, 2010, 1:27 pm1040 says:
why?
October 4, 2010, 1:29 pmDOuglas2 says:
According to the many news reports, yes.
October 4, 2010, 1:29 pmSasha Volokh says:
The fire department could have said “$75 per unit of time for insurance OR $10,000 if you need protection on the spot.” But the amount for spot protection had better be pretty high, or else you’ll see people systematically forgo the insurance and just pay on the spot. Just like with optional insurance generally, you can see unraveling (or just inefficient development) of the insurance market by adverse selection; only since the price of spot protection is going to have to be lower than the actual cost of losing your house in a fire, the problem will probably be worse.
October 4, 2010, 1:30 pmdee nile says:
How about just making the richest 1% of residents pay the full cost for everyone?
October 4, 2010, 1:32 pm1040 says:
let me guess (without doing the 30 seconds of investigation it should take to confirm my guess). this “community” votes overwhelmingly republican.
October 4, 2010, 1:32 pmBlue Neponset says:
The County should have contracted with the fire department(s) to make sure all country residents had fire protection. The County then should have charged the County residents for this service.
Leaving it up to the taxpayer is just plain stupid. One person shouldn’t be able to decide if a neighborhood burns down or gets poisoned. If Mr. Cranick had been storing [fill in nasty toxic waste] on his property then the fire could have killed people.
Everyone in this story looks like an idiot.
[OK Comments: Blue, the neighborhood didn't burn down. More broadly, whether a house fire necessarily spreads to other houses would seem to depend on the nature of the housing, terrain, and environmental conditions in Obion County. Given that none of us here seem to know much about that, I'm not sure we know enough to know if there are any "idiots" here or what is "just plain stupid." ]
October 4, 2010, 1:34 pm1040 says:
spoken like a true free marketer. how dare a company not sell a product that daniel foster wants them to sell!
October 4, 2010, 1:36 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
I see a certain problem here, namely, that with his principal asset reduced to ashes, the non-covered guy is judgment proof. Winning the suit doesn’t mean collecting for your losses. So the “private enforcement” plan has a big, big hole in it.
October 4, 2010, 1:36 pmAriel says:
I was going to suggest something very similar to this. The main advantage to having a fixed fee for spot protection is that it prevents the sort of contract “negotiation” where the homeowner is willing to pay whatever it takes. This takes away government discretion. As long as the fee spread is sufficiently high, people will not try to game the system.
As others have pointed out, this seems much more fair than the flood insurance system, where everyone subsidizes flood insurance through taxes and then pays for people who choose not to pay for it themselves if there is a big enough disaster.
October 4, 2010, 1:39 pmKharn says:
I’m surprised a subscription to the fire department’s services was not mandatory as part of their home owner’s insurance. A $1,000 on-the-spot rate (would they only accept credit cards or would a verbal promise to pay during a recorded phone call or signature be sufficient?) would be interesting, but I bet a lot of people would cry about how that’s mean.
Similar subscription agreements are normal in rural areas, just this one happened to make the news.
October 4, 2010, 1:40 pmDavid says:
An interesting question in my mind is whether the city spends any property/?local income? tax dollars as an “enabler” for the $75 fee. For instance, does the city pay a fixed amount (say $5k per year) for the privilege of their citizens to then spend another $75 for fire protection? If so, then it’s murky in my mind about the extra fee.
To respond to Lucia, we live in Pinellas county Florida. Down here medical EMS is provided through a single company by county fiat. It’s quasi-private, quasi-public. If you get transported by an ambulance, you have two options: Pay the going rates per mile/level of service or have previously bought a “membership” (for $70) that either gets you a discount or will accept whatever your insurance company is willing to pay.
I have to imagine a fire brigade can be done in a similar way. We already have counties wanting to charge for responding to accident scenes who have figured out rates for engines, ladder trucks, police officers, etc.
If I were a new city resident, based on my experience down here, I would expect the fire services to be provided no matter what and that if I didn’t pay the $75 “insurance” I would be on the hook for thousands of dollars of response.
October 4, 2010, 1:40 pmCalderon says:
I think that generally what the City of Fulton did was permissible. From an economic efficiency, public relations, and financial standpoint, if I were the City mayor or commissioner, I’d still offer to put out fire for those who did not pay the $75 annual fee, but at a cost whose NPV significantly exceeds the cost of the fee (for example, between $3,000 and $5,000). The county could offer payment plans for the cost.
The homeowner also would need to agree that the fee would be secured by a second mortgage on the property, so that if the homeowner did not pay the City would be able to have a sheriff’s sale of their home and take the proceeds after any earlier mortgages were paid off. While the county may still be short-changed if the homeowner is underwater on their home, the second mortgage should guarantee payment in most circumstances.
Finally, I’d think that most mortgage lenders or home insurers in Obion County would require the homeowner to pay the City’s fee, but maybe there was no mortgage or home insurance on this place.
October 4, 2010, 1:40 pmSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
Interesting fact pattern would have been if an “insured” neighbor’s house had burned and the fire had made it onto his property.
October 4, 2010, 1:41 pmgo vols says:
To me, this has always been a great weakness of libertarian philosophy (or at least, some of its elements). A major argument for such a scheme is that people must bear the brunt of their bad choices. And, as far as encouraging responsibility or preventing moral hazards, this makes sense. The problem, of course, is that (as someone pointed out upstream), society doesn’t always seem willing to let that happen. This seems especially true when it’s life and limb, rather than property, which are at stake.
The health care analogy also seems apt: if a 19 year old decides not to get health insurance (in a world in which there is no government coverage or mandates) and then contracts a fatal but curable disease, are we really going to let him die? The cost doesn’t seem proportionate to the mistake, and so I suspect society will always say “no,” or at least, will “do something” to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
I can see the same dynamic playing out in any number of areas: health care, product regulation, etc. I don’t see any escape from it.
October 4, 2010, 1:42 pmLitigator London says:
Yes, I think it does. In the 1700′s insurance companies in London started offering fire protection, but they would not attend a fire unless the property in question had the make of the insurance company on the outside. They would simply watch it burn – and possibly spread to a neighbouring property. From 1883, the insurance companies operated a consortium, but in 1862 they decided that they were unwilling to bear the expense for a city wide service and accordingly the fire and resecue services were municipalised and responsibility passed to the London Fire Brigade in 1866.
The system operated is unfair to those who do pay -as in the present case. The fire spread to the neighbour’s house. But if there had been earlier attendance, perhaps the neighbour could have been spared the damage. Then what if someone has to be rescued? The solution is city-wide coverage paid for out of local taxation. Why go back to the bad old days of the 1700′s? Was this perhaps a Tea Party brainwave for lower taxes? I suppose it’s potty enough.
October 4, 2010, 1:43 pmKevin! says:
The good news is that, since Mr. Cranick is a rational actor, he correctly obtained fire insurance in advance, and therefore this entire episode never happened.
October 4, 2010, 1:43 pmGuest14 says:
It’s funny watching libertarians insist that some guy losing his home for $75 is the best outcome (because that’s the market outcome, so by definition it must be best).
The reason libertarianism doesn’t have more support is because its “utopia” is just an awful, awful world.
October 4, 2010, 1:44 pmSenatorX says:
I agree with Sasha and Ariel. Seems like an easy fix.
October 4, 2010, 1:44 pmKevin R says:
I’m reminded of Marcus Licinius Crassus. From the Wikipedia article:
“Most notorious was his acquisition of burning houses: when Crassus received word that a house was on fire, he would arrive and purchase the doomed property along with surrounding buildings for a modest sum, and then employ his army of 500 clients to put the fire out before much damage had been done.”
October 4, 2010, 1:44 pmLibertarian1 says:
This is the same general problem facing health insurance companies with the mandate of must accept all, regardless of pre-existing illness. Why buy health insurance if you know that if you get ill the company must cover you?
The concept proposed by Gene Crenick is interesting to me. May I call NY Life and say I didn’t choose to buy a $100,000 policy on family member X but they just died. Here is my first year premium of $500, please send me the $100,000 check.
October 4, 2010, 1:45 pmwfjag says:
There seem to be some material facts overlooked by the commentators, and not made clear by the news story.
There is no Obion County Tennessee fire department — not even an Obion County (TN) Volunteer Fire Dept. Rather, it appears that while the Cranicks live in Obion County, the $75 fee would be paid to and pay for protection by the City of South Fulton (TN) Fire Department. Since the Cranicks did not live in the City of South Fulton, or pay its taxes, it’s not clear why anyone would expect that the City of South Fulton Fire Dept. would fight fires on their property unless they had contracted for that service (as their neighbor had).
There is a Obion County (TN) Volunteer Rescue Dept. My guess is that it would answer and provide EMS services.
October 4, 2010, 1:46 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Why would there be adverse selection? Surely there aren’t many people who actively burn down their own homes, even accidentally.
October 4, 2010, 1:46 pmDon Miller says:
These are called subscription-based fire districts. They are not uncommon in my area of Idaho. I am volunteer with a municipal department and we have some of these in our mutual aid district.
In Idaho, to switch from a subscription area to a tax-based service requires a 2/3rd majority vote of the people in the proposed Fire District. Without that vote, the City would be unable to make the fee mandatory.
Politics plays a big role in this. In my area, if the fire department feels like they are getting a good level of subscriptions, they will report to every fire, and bill the property owner if they are current on their fire subscription. At $250 per hour per fire engine, the price adds up fast. Suprisingly enough, most homeowners policies have a clause that allows payment in these kinds of situations.
The Dispatcher didn’t have the authority to negotiate a fee structure with the homeowner once the fire had started.
If the fire department had been trying to get the area to vote for a tax-based service unsuccessfully or if there are an extremely small number of people paying their subscriptions, sometimes they will resort to these kinds of tactics. About once a year I hear about a subscription service letting a non-payers house burn up.
Why wouldn’t people vote to form a taxing district? There are actually two reasons. 1. The tax is almost always higher than the subscription fee. 2. In a subscription district, the fire chief has little to no power to enforce fire codes.
My community started doing stuff like this in the late 60′s after 30 years of trying to get the people outside the city limits to pay something for their fire protection. After a few years, it led to the formation of a Rural Fire Protection District in the early 70s.
October 4, 2010, 1:47 pmJeff the Baptist says:
In my county, our EMT system is corporate and uses memberships. If you have a membership, you can call and the ambulance answers. You are not charged (or are charged a small nominal fee to prevent abuse) as this service is part of the yearly membership fee. If you do not have a membership, they still will show up but you have to pay their cost which is significantly higher than the membership fee and callout fee. They spell this out, complete with nominal costs, in their yearly mailing.
Now I’d imagine that fire service costs would be quite a bit higher than EMT, but the point of the insurance process is that you don’t want people freeloading on the service and only signing up the instant they have a fire for the price of a membership. The latter blows the actuarial calculations that went into the membership fees out of the water. Fine, but you can still charge them a larger sum to respond. Quantify the cost of either their specific call in manpower and materiel or compute a number for a typical response and charge them that as a large flat fee.
Commitment to a single fee structure is an incredibly stupid reason for a fire company to watch while someone’s house burns down. In fact payment for services rendered is the way fire companies used to work all across the country. If someone can be expected to make an informed cost decision when their life is on the line with an ambulance, they can certainly be relied upon to do it when they’re only facing a loss of property.
October 4, 2010, 1:51 pmPlugInMonster says:
The reason that straw-man libertarianism doesn’t exist is because it’s never been tried. But keep building those straw armies!
October 4, 2010, 1:52 pmBlue Neponset says:
The fire did spread to other property. So I guess we know enough about Obion County wind patterns to safely say that fire can spread in that part of our great country.
[OK Comments: I'm not sure if you're commenting in good faith, Blue, but I note that you've changed the question quite dramatically from your first comment to your second one.]
October 4, 2010, 1:52 pmMike says:
I think the “$75, or whatever it costs us to put it out plus a large penalty” seems like a better system than just letting the house burn. Especially since the department has to send out a truck to protect the neighbors anyway.
I’m also fairly certain that basic emergency services are still included in most libertarian visions of “Utopia.” Largely because of their time-sensitive nature.
The medical comparison is not particularly valid. This would be more like getting rejected for treatment from the hospital because you lack insurance, despite the fact that you are trying to hand them a check for the cost of treatment.
Honestly, is there any reason it is such a worse system for someone to take out a $5k loan in the event that they do have a fire rather than paying $75 a year to not have a fire? It all depends on the percentages. It seems to me that the failure in the system is not allowing someone to pay cash instead of paying for insurance.
October 4, 2010, 1:54 pmNeo says:
So does the ongoing fire constitute a “pre-existing condition” ?
October 4, 2010, 1:54 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
I believe that’s the Democratic Party slogan for 2010.
October 4, 2010, 1:57 pmDr. K says:
OK, what if the guy actually paid the fee and the fire HE started spread to a neighbor who did not?
October 4, 2010, 1:58 pmjosh says:
Carter said: “The basic logic of proponents of that provision is that when push comes to shove, society will be too soft hearted and give emergency care to people like Gene Cranick who opted not to get insurance.”
It’s not whether society “will be” too soft hearted. Society already is. It’s called the Emergency Room.
October 4, 2010, 1:58 pmLitigator London says:
Well, what about the neighbour who paid for the service and whose whose was damaged? Would he (or his insurer by subrogation) have a claim in negligence against his neighbour for negligently setting a fire without sufficient precautions – ie paying for a first responder service? But the uninsured neighbour may not be worth powder & shot. So neighbour or his insurer loses out.
October 4, 2010, 1:59 pmuh_clem says:
My take is that the correct approach for the fire department is to emulate the emergency room. If somebody shows up in the ER, they get treated regardless of their insurance status. Likewise, the fire department should extinguish a working fire without regard to payment status (imagine if they let your house burn down due to a bureaucratic snafu).
I’m not sure what kind of oath firefighters take to protect the public, but I think as defenders of public safety their moral obligation is to act regardless of how it gets paid for.
Now, all that said, the proper action after the fire is out is to bill the uninsured property owner for the full cost of the service – hourly rate for each firefighter (be sure to include benefits and prep/clean-up time), rental rate and transportation costs for the equipment, overhead, etc. I’m sure that this is well into 5 figures for even a small fire.
If money’s actually important (and why on earth wouldn’t it be?) billing for each non-insured firefighting incident could substantially help their bottom line by subsidizing their overhead. Maybe they could even find that guy from the medical industry who came up with the $20 aspirin to help them write their rate sheet….
October 4, 2010, 2:00 pmDon Miller says:
Typically, if a fire started on fee paying property, fire fighters have a responsibility to contain the fire and protect all the exposures around it, fee paying or not.
At least, based on the operating guidelines in my area.
October 4, 2010, 2:01 pmpete the elder says:
The romans had on the spot fire coverage for a while, IIRC using slaves or freeman to fight the fire for a fee. Marcus Crassus made much of his fortune by going to fires, buying the neighboring properties cheap while the fire was burning and then having his personal fire brigade put out the fires. This was a plot point in one of Steven Saylor’s Gordianus novels.
Marcus Egnatius Rufus created a free fire brigade that he paid for and Augustus later followed up with a state sponsored brigade of slaves that went around putting out fires. Fires spreading through crowded tenaments was a huge danger in Rome and it made sense to have the state sponsor the firefighting.
October 4, 2010, 2:03 pmDan Weber says:
It seems that much value was lost by letting the house go up. The fire department could have a set price for people who don’t pay up front — say, ten thousand dollars — and have that automatically applied as a lien against the house when they show up to extinguish a fire.
There are still important details to deal with, like partial fires and false alarms and just who can contract for the fire department to show up.
October 4, 2010, 2:05 pm1040 says:
“There are no libertarians in foxholes”!
October 4, 2010, 2:05 pmBABH says:
Exactly. Perhaps if their house had been small enough to drown in a bathtub, they could have put the fire out themselves.
October 4, 2010, 2:07 pmmikeyes says:
Subscription fire protection is common in the South, I’ve lived with it much of my life in TN and my family readily paid the fee, which was usually not so high as to make us not want to. We also contributed to the various relief funds and attended the fire dept. picnics. It was just common sense to do so in this situation.
The fire department mentioned in the article has no way of collecting the money owed them from a non-subscriber and promises under stress may not be honored very often (about 50% of the time according to one article.)
The city council of South Fulton is being blamed for the loss of the house and the fact that they are all Republicans seems to be tied to this for some reason. I suspect that the fiscal aspects of this problem is more germane and would occur no matter what party they belonged to – they have an obligation to their taxpayers. This TN county has tried for years to consolidate the various fire departments and pay them by taxing all the residents. Such a scheme has been opposed strongly by various factions and never came to being.
Now I live in WI now where just the opposite occurs, but it is still makes sense to contribute to the fireman’s relief funds and to attend the fundraisers for the volunteer companies.
October 4, 2010, 2:10 pmBlue Neponset says:
Wouldn’t that just result in the government being more involved in the process? How much trouble would it be for the county to just charge everyone in the affected area $75?
It seems to me the libertarian solution to this problem requires a lot more government involvement than the socialist/statist solution.
October 4, 2010, 2:12 pmJ Mann says:
You can get around the collection problem by passing a law authorizing a fireman’s lien. If you call the fire department and agree to pay “whatever it costs,” the Fire Dept gets to put a lien on your house/garnish your wages to collect.
October 4, 2010, 2:15 pmJ Mann says:
You can get around the collection problem by passing a law authorizing a fireman’s lien. If you call the fire department and agree to pay “whatever it costs,” the Fire Dept gets to put a lien on your house/garnish your wages to collect.
October 4, 2010, 2:15 pmTed says:
Either you are ignoring facts or misinterpreting them. Only one “folk” made the choice to forgo protection, not the neighbor, who’s property was damaged because the other guy choose to forgo protection. Thus, there is a problem, i.e., a person who choose fire-protection was unnecessarily damaged by a person who did not.
What further “solution” do you have for Andrew’s correct response to this:
Why? I don’t see how that would affect the point here. That changes who is negligent.
Even more apt. What if that 19 year old contracts a curable but contagious fatal disease? If he had insurance, he would get treated. If he doesn’t he may not, and infects others, just like the fire spreading. Also note that tort law is not very adept at handling liability for the spread of contagious diseases.
How do libertarians justify the moral reality that people who fail to act rationally affect the lives of others? This conundrum is especially clear in cases where the harm is irreparable. Would you trade the value of your current home and personal, with all the sentiment attached to those, for a shiny new home of “equal value.” Most people would not.
This is a great idea, assuming the richest 1% have a significant margin of wealth above that of the other county residents. So if there are two hundred residents, and 2 of them make more than $5M per year, it seems like a very good idea to require those two people to pay the $15,000 required to cover everyone. OTOH, if everyone makes between $100,000 and $200,000 in the county, it doesn’t make as much sense, because that margin is too small to justify shifting the burden.
October 4, 2010, 2:17 pmDr. K says:
When I was growing up in a rural part of NY, there was a case where 2 local volunteer fire companies actually had a fistfight to determine who would put out the fire while the house burned to the ground. My how times have changed.
October 4, 2010, 2:19 pmrmark says:
I pay an annual fee of $100 to the nearest city for fire service, which caps the amount I have to pay if a fire occurs on my property. A non-payer will still have service but will be billed the full cost.
October 4, 2010, 2:20 pmLarvell Blanks says:
Marcus Licinius Crassus knew how to handle these situations.
October 4, 2010, 2:26 pmptt says:
People should look at the video at the link before commenting. This took place in a rural area. When the fire “spread to a neighbor’s property”, it spread to a field, not a house.
I noticed two other things:
The difference in accent between residents and the newscasters is almost comical.
The argument that the resources of the fire department shouldn’t be tied up by non-payers would be a lot more solid if the firefighters hadn’t spent the afternoon hanging around watching the house burn.
October 4, 2010, 2:26 pmAndy Krause says:
” Likewise, the fire department should extinguish a working fire without regard to payment status (imagine if they let your house burn down due to a bureaucratic snafu).”
I agree with this. It is plain common sense wrong for a fire department not to respond to a fire call. The legal factors can be dealt with afterwards.
October 4, 2010, 2:26 pmC60 says:
To the poster who inquired, Obion County TN voted 66% McCain and 32% Obama in 2008, fwiw.
October 4, 2010, 2:27 pmmatt d says:
The fire department probably should have at least hosed down the uncontracted property since they were there already, although actually putting firemen at personal risk by going into the building would have been above and beyond the call.
The city should write a separate contract for fire suppression on properties where the owner didn’t contract, and then write a law with a $5000 penalty (via a lien on the land) for anyone who summons the fire department without having a contract of their own. And maybe a negligence penalty if the fire spreads to a contracted property.
-m@
October 4, 2010, 2:30 pmJohn A. Fleming says:
The reason we have fire depts. is that uncontrolled fires present too much danger to the community, as this instance shows. Harry Homeowner has a poor track record of containing the fire to his property. A few more instances like this, and the good citizens of Obion County will wise up and change their minds and vote in some sort of time-tested efficacious fire protection scheme. That’s not libertarian hell, that’s just how the world works. It’s people who try to force utopia and banish tragedy who create hell on earth.
October 4, 2010, 2:32 pmhattio says:
wfjag says;
But, I can’t figure out what new information there is in there that wasn’t in this paragraph from the original post
October 4, 2010, 2:34 pmAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
The current system is fine, and is in use elsewhere. The fire department is missing an opportunity though. They should accept a credit card over the phone up front and charge $1,000 an hour or so to cover direct cost, equipment wear, lessened coverage for subscribers, etc,
October 4, 2010, 2:35 pmCurt F. says:
Asked about JP MorganChase’s initial offer for Bear Stearns of $2 a share, Jaime Dimon of JP Morgan said that “Buying a house and buying a house on fire” are two different things.
Gene Cranick seems to have lived through the opposite scenario.
October 4, 2010, 2:37 pmadvocate says:
And with uninsured property reduced to ashes, your lien will be collected when, exactly? It is simply not a good decision to “negotiate” on the spot with the fire victim who earlier wouldn’t or couldn’t pay $75 for protection. They’ll tell you anything they think you’ll want to hear, and you have no way of knowing if you’ll get the money. Going to the fire, and trusting on a cumbersome method of collecting via lien, is a good way for the fire company to go broke, as people stop paying the $75 fee and the liened property owners stiff them. (“Hell, why pay off the $5000 lien? I’m retired and not going anywhere, and they can’t/won’t try to foreclose on me. Meanwhile they can’t garnish my retirement.”)
Don Miller, thanks for your very informative post. I had read previously that these arrangements are common out West; and that if you haven’t paid, they will just watch your property burn.
October 4, 2010, 2:38 pmUSpace says:
The County should pay a fee to the other town for use of their FD, and then should just levy a form of property tax against its residents.
:)
October 4, 2010, 2:41 pmMike says:
I would add that, as a policy decision, it makes very little sense to judge these sorts of things on an individual incident basis.
The question is, when aggregated over the total households served, what is the relative merit of universal versus a choice of insurance?
According to the first answer I found in google, the chance of your house catching fire during your lifetime is around .08%. Some quick math puts the actual expected value of that damage loss on a $150k at around $120… for your lifetime. Makes that $75 seem a fairly poor investment to the vast majority of people… Insurance is always a gamble. Not getting it was a horrible choice for this guy. Getting it was a moderately bad choice for everyone whose house didn’t burn down that year.
October 4, 2010, 2:43 pmLucia says:
Sure, the system of letting houses burn is a stupid one.
But it seems the county hasn’t passed any law about fees or dictating what people in unincorporated areas might pay. The fire company is operated by a city, not a corporation. The Cranicks don’t live in the city.
It seems like a problem whose solution requires the county to act. The city can’t really do much to fix this stupid system. Are city tax payers required to provide services to county residents who won’t vote to come up with a less stupid solution?
October 4, 2010, 2:44 pmBaseballhead says:
In this case, it may even be that the homeowner Cranick was being perfectly rational. In the linked story, he said,
In other words, he — rationally — chose not to pay them because (1) the chances of him needing the fire department were slim, and (2), he figured they’d come out anyways.
People can act in a perfectly rational manner and still be wrong, and dangerously so.
October 4, 2010, 2:45 pmPeter Gerdes says:
This is just silly.
We are talking about paying for state services. They need not negotiate a contract in the normal fashion but merely pass a law granting themselves a stake in the home’s equity set somewhere between the equity value their services protect and the cost incurred. Let the people who are really hardcore specifically opt out of such backup protection and then the fire department can use their home fires as practice once it’s burned for awhile.
Besides from a practical standpoint this is a stupid solution for everyone. The marginal cost for the fire department to put out this fire is quite low the only reason to refrain from putting out the non-payer’s fire is to deter people from non-payment in the future but this end would be better served by just asking the guy to agree to become a fire protection payment advocate.
October 4, 2010, 2:52 pmTed says:
This is somewhat related to one of the posts above. Do any /negligence/tort lawyers know of any cases where there has been an affirmative duty to buy insurance and that failure to obtain insurance was a breach of that duty? It is not known if the guy who set the fire did so negligently. Although damage to the a joining property would have been prevented if he had purchased fire insurance, did he have a duty as a reasonable person to do so? Was he negligent by not doing so? I don’t the answers are clear, which means that adjacent property owner might not have any “private action” recourse against the fire-starter at all. What solution does a libertarian philosophy provide to this scenario?
October 4, 2010, 2:53 pmSchroedinger's Hamster says:
I’m astonished nobody has made reference to Ambrose Bierce’s fictional dialogue on this subject:
October 4, 2010, 2:54 pmDan Lavatan says:
The land underlying the home has value. Since mortage companies mandate this sort of coverage, we can assume they own it outright and it is likley to cover the cost of any damage.
October 4, 2010, 2:58 pmDOuglas2 says:
So if my house is on fire, but the fire brigade that my city runs is off putting out the fire of a non-taxpayer in the adjacent jurisdiction, they can just magic up another out of thin air to come to my aid?
October 4, 2010, 2:59 pmkatahdin says:
It’s easier to tell whether a property is covered than whether a person is. If I’m walking past Mr. Cranick’s house and an errant driver runs me down, I’d hate for the ambulance to not come because Mr. Cranick has not elected to subscribe to the ambulance service, while I did subscribe.
If you are driving by, are you morally obligated to stop and help with the bucket brigade? I’m trying to parse out what moral obligations people have in general vs. by accepting employment. I generally think of my duty as an employee to be to my employer’s wishes, not to the public at large (especially ‘regardless of how it gets paid for’, employers usually care a lot about that). To put it another way, do firemen have an obligation that plumbers do not? No one was trapped in Mr. Cranick’s house, and a burst pipe can cause a lot of damage.
October 4, 2010, 3:03 pmBen P says:
It’s not just that emergency rooms exist. There’s a federal law (EMTALA) that requires hospitals to provide medical care to those in an emergency situation until they are “stable,” regardless of ability to pay.
A democratic congress passed it and Reagan signed it in the 80′s after some widely publicized events of people dying because Hospital A, which was 5 mins away, refused to treat an uninsured person, and they died en route to hospital B (45 mins away).
EMTALA is the precise reason most hospital emergency rooms consider it a very good year if they can collect 50% of what they bill. (many urban hospitals are closer to the 1/4th mark).
That’s the sticker in any healthcare legislation. It creates a massive “free rider” problem, and any legislation we propose has to address this in some way or it will fail.
October 4, 2010, 3:06 pmM. Gross says:
I’m not really seeing any problem with events as they unfolded.
Mr. Cranick made his choice, and was stuck with the outcome of his rather poor decisions.
October 4, 2010, 3:07 pmThe Liberal says:
The usual idiots are out in force on this comment. Talking about “personal responsibility” and all is just fine. But note that in this case, “personal responsibility” as an ideological excuse to let someone’s house burn down is economically inefficient.
The fire department is clearly a collective good. That is, most of the time, there are zero fires to put out. To illustrate, it would be economically inefficient for a “community” consisting of a single house to operate a fire department. It takes many houses and other structures to justify the provision of a fire department. Somehow, the cost has to be shared among the houses and other structures served.
Now, most of the time, the fire department is just sitting there NOT performing its primary function of putting out fires. For this reason, fire departments have expanded their missions; i.e. they often will be first responders in the case of medical emergencies. In any case, when an actual fire occurs, the fire department is typically available to respond as there are probably not very many other fires going on. When the fire department does not respond when it is available, this is just a waste of resources. This is illustrated well in this case; the fire here damaged not only the property of the non-paying homeowner, but a neighboring property as well.
So, we have an “available” fire department and a fire doing damage. There is obviously value to be created here, the idiotic savage cries of “personal responsibility” notwithstanding.
I think that conservatives who think the house should burn down are interesting. Conservatives, back in the day, used to complain that liberals, when they advocate for redistribution, are excessively focused on dividing the pie when we should really be focusing on maximizing the pie. Here, conservatives want to destructively burn the pie due entirely to distributional concerns. It is important, as a matter of principle, that those who are not considered “personally responsible” be made to pay a price, even if requiring them to do so unnecessarily destroys value. Talk about warfare. I guess all of that rhetoric about how we should focus on maximizing the pie was sort of so much BS, right?
Anyway, if one were to focus on maximizing the pie, the answer would be to save the house. BUT, that doesn’t mean that all the value created caused by saving the house should flow to people who were not “personally responsible” in paying their dues for fire service. For example, value would be created if 90% of the value saved from saving the property went to the fire department and 10% flowed to the “irresponsible” homeowners. Now, clearly, a 911 call is not the place to create such a contract; so you would have to have default terms. It is like when an individual is provided medical services when they are unconscious; they are generally liable for the fair value of those services even though they do not have the opportunity to consent. Here, we might allow the fire department to keep the bulk of the value it is creating, leaving 10% to the owners to encourage their cooperation.
This is still problematic. How much of the house would have burned down (i.e. how much value was created by the fire department) if the fire department hadn’t put it out is a difficult question. Often, one expects that this question would be subject to litigation, precisely because it is difficult. Still, litigating the amount of value created is still more efficient than having the house burn down.
Here is an even better solution. Make the dues to the fire department a tax. If the tax is not paid, the consequences are the same as failure to pay any other tax. (A tax lien is placed on your property and collection activity is commenced.) Then the fire department comes out to save the house (whether or not it is current on its taxes) and there is no time wasted determining if the property is covered before sending the fire department.
Another perverse problem arises with the idiotic “personal responsibility” crowd (who are advocating an irresponsible method of enforcing personal responsibility). That is, errors in records. Clearly, if fire service is only provided to subscribers, you know that there will sometimes be delays while the fire department or 911 searches its records to see if the caller is qualified for services. “Sorry! Windows just crashed! I have to reboot my computer before I can verify that you are qualified for fire service…”
Or even more perverse, you paid your dues, but the minimum wage clerk failed to enter your record in properly, and it isn’t coming up. Or, somehow the data showing you paid was deleted, corrupted, deleted by a hacker, etc. The personal responsibility crowd is so perverse in its desire to punish those deemed to be “irresponsible” that they are willing to inflict damages on the “responsible” due payers when the fire spreads to other properties (as happened here) or when a house burns down because of a mistake in the fire department’s record keeping. And record keeping errors do happen Why would anyone assume that these records are going to be kept in perfect order; I guarantee that such records will have errors that in this case would only be corrected after it was too late.
Let us keep in mind another cost the “personal responsibility” crowd would inflict. Sometimes, more the property is at risk from a fire. Sometimes lives are at risk. A visitor (perhaps of a neighboring property that catches fire) who ends up being a fatality of a fire because, unknown to them, the homeowner was “irresponsible” in not paying for fire coverage is what the “personal responsibility” crowd would call “collateral damage” in the war against the irresponsible.
The following is quite clear. The most economically efficient method for paying for fire protection is through taxation. Those who are willing to sacrifice lives and property in the name of their ideology are very interesting, however. How different are they from people like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot? Oh, I guess they are responsible for the deaths of fewer people. But still, they are willing to cause death in order to advance their ideology; are they really THAT different? But how many lives should be sacrificed for an idea? (Whether that idea is “personal responsibility” or the idea is “taxation is theft” from the extreme right fringes or the idea is “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” on the extreme left.)
Just saying. I find something quite perverse yet somehow fascinating in the pure destructiveness of the ideological maniacs who think we should just let the house burn down, despite the obvious risks to not only property, but lives.
October 4, 2010, 3:10 pmOrenWithAnE says:
No, but it would be nice if the City offered an a la carte option specifying how the cost would be calculated and giving the homeowner the right to designate secondary people authorized to incur such an expenses (taken against his interest in the home, naturally). In that case, the guy would realize that burning his leaves carries with it the risk of a $1000 (???) charge.
So long at the spot price is calibrated so that the average take covers expenses, who cares? The Fire Dept could even hedge it out.
The cost is not proportional to the mistake, the cost is proportional to the mistake multiplied by the inverse probability of the unlikely event occurring. Or, if you prefer to cast statistics the other way, the cost is proportional to the mistake times the number of people that made the mistake without paying up.
A 1:36 bet against snake eyes is not “unfair” when you lose $36 on a single roll.
Unless, despite their best efforts, there is no house left to lien.
October 4, 2010, 3:14 pmavisame says:
The City of Fulton offers an option to non-residents (and non-taxpayers) that it is otherwise not required to provide to them. Should the fire department of any city within a given distance of Obion County be required to respond whether or not they offer the subscription option? Once the Fulton fire department had responded to the neighbor’s fire and was already on the scene, did they not have a duty to use the resources already in place to put out the Cranick’s fire?
October 4, 2010, 3:14 pmHarry Eagar says:
One reason for having government-run, universal service fire departments is that, over time, you get better fire protection, by supporting professionalization, research and providing a market for private innovators to sell their safety equipment to.
You might also avoid the temptation of pyromaniacs to join volunteer fire departments and set fires so they will have something to do.
For the same reason, government-supported rural hospitals may be inefficient by the measures libertarians use, but they have payoffs you don’t get by concentrating medical services in one location.
October 4, 2010, 3:19 pmDaMav says:
The current system seems fine to me except that letting fires burn creates a risk to other property owners. It’s not hard to wonder what the response would have been if the initial fire burning out of control ended up spreading and destroying several local properties that were in fact insured for fire fighting. The uninsured homeowner thus creates a significant risk for others.
At the same time, forcing people to buy insurance isn’t very appealing (cf: ObamaCare).
A boilerplate contract might be drawn up for services in such circumstances, but would it be considered as being signed under duress?
It’s kind of interesting to see all the snarky comments on this at Think Progress. The default assumption appears to be that fire fighters at your beck and call is a human right and ought to be free.
October 4, 2010, 3:20 pmLooking In says:
Gene Crannick, the homeowner whose place was allowed to burn down, is a classic free rider. In a local article, he was quoted thusly: “I thought they’d come out and put it out, even if you hadn’t paid your $75, but I was wrong.”
In this case, you had a small town fire department that served the town, and any rural residents who paid in advance. In the past, that department would try to collect a $500 fee for services delivered to people outside the town, but they had no legal authority to force payment, and half the people never paid. So they went to a subscription model, which is essentially an insurance program.
Gene Crannick decided not to get his local fire insurance. The fire department did save the neighbor’s house when Crannick’s fire spread there, because the neighbor is a subscriber. If I was the neighbor, I’d turn around and sue Crannick for not having local fire insurance that would have prevented my place from catching on fire.
The ideal solution for all these issues, of course, is to have a county fire department. That way, everyone in the county pays something for insurance.
In the real world, though, the rural folks accurately realize that most of the protection and most of the calls are in town, so they refuse to pay. The townspeople are fine with having their department put out fires out of town, but they accurately are concerned about the cost.
That’s how subscriptions get started. And there’s always a free rider, a cheapskate like Gene Crannick who decides to play the odds.
October 4, 2010, 3:22 pmohwilleke says:
Did he have a mortgage? (Probably.) Did he have homeowner’s insurance? (Probably.) Was his failure to get fire department coverage a breach of either contractual obligation? (Probably.) Should he face liability to indemnify whoever suffers the economic impact of the loss, at least in the part attributable to lacking fire protection? (Yes.) Will he probably have his home foreclosed upon as a result? (Probably yes.) Is he probably judgment proof? (Yes.)
October 4, 2010, 3:22 pmK.Chen says:
Money quote from the press linked in the original post:
I’m not sure if there is a way to interpret this as anything other than someone trying to get a free lunch.
What should have happened is a preset, per-incident fee, whether flat or some sort of graduated scheme that Cranick could have bought from the department. Of course, the best thing to do was for someone to try to save his house, purely of charitable and neighborly spirit. Fire is a bad way to teach lessons.
October 4, 2010, 3:23 pmDaMav says:
Honey I’ve got good news and bad news.
Oh?
Well, good news first. I saved us $ 75 last year….
October 4, 2010, 3:23 pmAnthony says:
This is a pretty good example of why mandatory taxes exist, though the deliberate fire starting adds a level of stupidity not ordinarily present in situations like this. On the original question: I think the county should require all residents to acquire coverage. Requiring the fire department to contract after the fire occurs runs into several issues:
1) Many fires won’t actually have anyone immediately available to do the contracting. If the fire had started while Cranick was out, it would really be preferable if the fire department could just put it out (say, due to a neighbor reporting), without waiting to get in contact with Cranick. This is particularly a factor for rental property.
2) Many people who can afford to pay a $75 annual fee cannot afford to pay for fire service on demand, which is almost certainly thousands of dollars, if not tens or hundreds of thousands. Particularly since someone who’s just had a house fire isn’t generally in the best financial shape anyway.
3) Letting fires burn, in most areas, will cause damage to property not owned by the person who isn’t willing to pay. This is particularly true for rental property, but due to spread, is true for almost all buildings in urban or suburban areas.
If not for factor 3, on-demand fire fighting wouldn’t be problematic as a policy issue, though it would often be a poor choice for the homeowner due to factors 1 and 2.
October 4, 2010, 3:24 pmTom Maguire says:
FWIW, the county had a policy of charging $500 for responding to rural, non-covered calls. The collection rate was about 50% and there was no legal means of enforcing the claim (which seems odd to me).
Anyway,the mayor was intent on making his point.
October 4, 2010, 3:25 pmDeanS says:
Could someone that doesn’t believe this is a proper outcome explain why there is a moral obligation for South Fulton citizens to provide fire protection Obion County residents when those Obion County residents have decided they are unwilling to pay for it themselves?
This sounds like a modern rendition of the Ant and the Grasshopper.
October 4, 2010, 3:25 pmMikey says:
That may well be true, but in this specific case the residents of the county do not fall under the taxation authority of the city that runs the fire department.
When it comes down to it, the owner of the house that burned knew exactly what he’d have to do to ensure service if his house caught fire. He chose not to do that, assuming incorrectly that he’d be able to free-ride on his neighbors’ willingness to pay.
October 4, 2010, 3:25 pmmattc says:
this is the exact opposite of how the comments section on the healthcare mandate turned out. i figure most of you liberals believe this to be a just consequence of free markey chaos, when this seems like a pretty natural extension of the welfare state. what taxes does this man pay and why are they not already accoutned for the in the fire depo service?
October 4, 2010, 3:25 pmGBED989 says:
This thread has been very educational and entertaining.
October 4, 2010, 3:28 pmohwilleke says:
If there was an option to pay on the spot, how could the fire department know that he had an ability to pay?
One would need, at least, to create a statutory lien for the fire department for that kind of charge which should be prior to not only the owner’s interest but also to that of all current lien’s of record, since the value they hope to collect out of would be eliminated but for the fire department’s actions.
October 4, 2010, 3:28 pmohwilleke says:
What is someone was in the burning building and couldn’t get out? What if the person reporting the fire was a neighbor who didn’t know that? What if failure to respond caused the fire to be harder to control causing an fee paying neighbor or bystander from out of town to die?
October 4, 2010, 3:32 pm1040 says:
Torts. Torts. Torts.
October 4, 2010, 3:35 pmThe Curmudgeonly Ex-Clerk says:
That may be workable in some jurisdictions, but not in Texas, I think, due to our generous homestead exemption. I know some other states also have homestead exemptions of one sort or another. Tennessee, where the subject incident occurred, apparently has such an exemption — though it seems fairly limited in nature. But if the neighbor’s property damage here is relatively minor (as seems likely here) and the Cranicks have no other assets, then they probably are judgment proof in a suit by the neighbor.
October 4, 2010, 3:36 pmohwilleke says:
Vacant land with burnt rubble on it is still almost always worth more than the cost a fire department incurs in making a call. As long as a fireman’s lien has priority over mortgages and other lienholders who benefit from the fire protection action as much as the owner does and extends to costs of collection as well as to the amount of the lien itself, collection should not be a problem in the vast majority of cases.
October 4, 2010, 3:37 pmuh_clem says:
I think there is a credo among firefighters of having an obligation to do their duty no matter what the danger. Remember the aftermath of 911 and all the lionization of our brave first responders? I don’t recall the same treatment of any plumbers.
Anyway, plumbers usually work on a fee-for-service basis. I’ve never heard of a plumber refusing a service call because you haven’t previously bought insurance from him.
October 4, 2010, 3:40 pmTed says:
The grass hopper only hurt himself.
October 4, 2010, 3:41 pmAnthony says:
Your logic completely evades me. He paid county taxes, and the county taxes didn’t cover a fire department. The city of Tracy chose to offer fire coverage to unincorporated areas, likely at a modest loss, presumably because having unincorporated Obion County go up in a massive ball of flames would cause problems for Tracy, but this fire department is being covered by the taxes for the city of Tracy, so it should really be thought of as equivalent to a private external contractor for fire services.
As a note, the option of ‘the fire department should respond to fires on uncovered homes, and in doing so may place a legally enforceable lien against the home’ has some obvious abuse potential.
October 4, 2010, 3:42 pmjmaie says:
The following is quite clear.
Wouldn’t it have been more correct to say, “Obviously the following is quite clear…”
October 4, 2010, 3:52 pmrilkefan says:
That sure looks like some disappointing hypocrisy, OK.
October 4, 2010, 3:53 pmIspep Teid says:
The outcome seems appropriate to me. The man who didn’t want protection didn’t get protection. Simple.
October 4, 2010, 3:55 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
I am not at all sure this is true in rural areas, which are, moreover, where we find subscription fire services. Google suggests values on the order of $3500/acre. That probably isn’t as much as the cost of hauling the burnt rubble away. Frankly, if he wasn’t willing to pay the $75 fee, I’m not full of sympathy myself. But I do think that mandatory coverage paid with taxes is likely to be a superior system.
October 4, 2010, 3:57 pmIspep Teid says:
Is there a concept something like a fireman’s lien? Maybe the fire department could choose to save the building in exchange for an risk-appropriate interest in the property.
October 4, 2010, 3:57 pmLooking In says:
What’s also interesting here is how few people know very much about how rural areas work. Subscription-based fire departments are hardly new.
BTW, I was wrong in my first post. There wasn’t a house fire at the freerider’s neighbor’s place. There was a grass fire caused by the freerider’s fire, and the firefighters put it out because the neighbor was a subscriber. And the fire department routinely will do enough for a non-subscriber’s fire to prevent it from spreading to a subscriber’s place. But only that much.
To the “Liberal” above, I agree that counties ought to just have universal fire protection, funded by taxes. That’s what I’d vote for, anyway. But in that part of Tennessee (and plenty of other rural areas too), the people are served by subscription-based services. Often by staffed by volunteers, with the subscription fees paying for nothing other than the equipment.
Gene Crannick is a perfect example of a free rider. If he was too poor to pay the fee, it’d be one thing. But there’s been no mention of that in any coverage, so I’m going to provisionally conclude that he was too cheap to pay the fee. I’m actually pretty liberal myself (Obama voter, Democratic contributor, etc.), but I’m not stupid about it. I’m with the town fire department on this one. If you’re looking for the villain, go find Gene Crannick, the cheapskate.
He didn’t pay his local fire insurance. Now, maybe the town ought to fix it so they can take a credit card over the phone. I’d say a thousand bucks ought to cover it. But they’re under no obligation to do that.
October 4, 2010, 3:59 pmjsmith says:
I know this has libertarians gushing with glee, but really? It’s economically efficient for a fire service to refuse to save (or even partially save) a house and all the time, labour and materials that went into building it, even with an express offer of monetary reward. The only way this could be ‘efficient’ would be if the entire country operated under this system and it served as a cautionary tale. Not only does that still prevent people from going without insurance (because humans are stupid and make irrational choices), but it’s not reality.
This might (and I emphasize *might*) chime with some misguided notion of ‘personal responsibility’, but that is completely outweighed by the fact that it is totally, utterly morally wrong to allow people to suffer when you can alleviate their suffering. The lack of empathy on here is sickening, the worship of the almighty dollar as if it was the most precious value in the universe equally so. If I go through life without a penny to my name and the lot of you are millionaires, I will still be richer.
October 4, 2010, 4:00 pmlev Myshkin says:
personal responsibility trumps compassion!
Let them burn!. Let them die.
Laissez-faire all the way.
Remember, when America made libraries public, in contradiction to wishes of the Founding Fathers,we started down the slippery slope to socialism …..
October 4, 2010, 4:01 pmrilkefan says:
Uhh, I was nodding along until this point, but yikes. Please pick a different handle if you’re prone to going for quick trips to nutty comparison land.
October 4, 2010, 4:01 pmBen P says:
On the other hand, I have heard of a plumber refusing a service call (for some serious flooding) because he informed the people that the work (replacing a pipe broken off in a very awkward location) would cost a significant amount of money to fix, (several thousand) and the people informing him their homeowners insurance had lapsed and they didn’t have that kind of money.
The plumber said “well I feel for you, but I’m sorry, I can’t work for free.” Turned around, packed up his truck and left.
October 4, 2010, 4:01 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
It’s hard to imagine a likely scenario in which I start a fire, and that fire spreads to my house and to my neighbor’s property, but I wasn’t negligent in some way.
If we posit a hypothetical scenario in which a fire damages my property without any negligence on anybody’s part, then, well, stuff happens. I’m not sure what “solution” is needed, because I’m not sure what the problem is.
(Note that the adjacent property owner ought to have his own homeowner’s insurance to compensate him for his own losses.)
October 4, 2010, 4:04 pmptt says:
And exactly how would you avoid paying for garbage pick-up?
October 4, 2010, 4:06 pmuh_clem says:
Just to be clear – I think the way it should be is that (1) the fire department should put out fires in it’s geographical coverage area (i.e. the area where subscriptions are offered) and (2) then have the legal means to collect for the full cost of the service if the homeowner is uninsured.
It appears that in this case item (2) is missing or too weak to be of use. So I can’t say I fault the fire department here, and have little sympathy for the homeowner.
October 4, 2010, 4:06 pmDon Miller says:
I was reading about this same topic on some firefighter message boards.
One fire chief from Missouri said he had problems with his departments insurance carrier in his subscription district. Insurance Company refused to cover the fire department for damage to their equipment or injuries to his firefighters if they responded to fires at locations where the people had not paid their fire subscriptions. The Insurance Company argument was that if someone didn’t pay their subscription, they had voluntarily removed themselves from the fire district. The fire department was automatically not covered on their own insurance if they responded out of district, unless they received a valid mutual aid request from another jurisdiction.
There was another news story that said this particular County has been trying for 20 years to get a fire protection tax passed, but the homeowners regularly defeat it.
October 4, 2010, 4:09 pmptt says:
http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/More-fallout-following-house-fire-104113489.html
Ah, life in a small town…
October 4, 2010, 4:09 pmD.T. says:
Having lived in a rural area more than thirty years, all I can say is that, before we organized our own volunteer fire department, when I called the nearest fire department (volunteer), they showed up—but there was a fire call charge. It varied over the years from $250.00 to $500.00. And home insurance was usually happy to pay it.
Also, if the fire was big enough, all the surrounding fire districts sent trucks, but you only paid the call charge to the originating department. Plus, all the neighbors. With the winds on the Southern Plains, a fire can rapidly build to an uncontrollable miles wide front.
I suppose local conditions probably have a lot to do with fire department customs. And laws. A one size fits all rule seems unreasonable.
D.T.
October 4, 2010, 4:11 pmBen P says:
I think you miss the point.
Why is “economic efficiency” a sufficient basis to force party A to expend valuable resources for Party B’s benefit, when Party B is not providing any compensation to party A?
Perhaps there’s an economic efficiency basis for making this a tax, (and I agree there is such basis), but when we do something like that we, as a society need to recognize what we’re doing.
Even many relatively extreme libertarians wouldn’t really want a government with no police and fire services. There’s a difference between a libertarian and an anarchist.
However, it does grind most libertarians the wrong way when people start talking about service that we ALL pay for as if it’s some kind of a natural right. If you think the common good is served by the government of our area requiring everyone to contribute toward the maintenance of a group that will put out all fires within our area, that’s a perfectly fine argument to make.
However, it seriously confuses the argument to demand that where another group has made this decision, and you haven’t, that the other group’s fire department also has an obligation to come and serve you for free.
The same is true of healthcare. If you think society as a whole benefits if the government requires everyone to pay for a healthcare service that will treat people without ability to pay, that’s fine and you’re free to attempt to convince people of that.
But when people start talking about healthcare as a “human right” you get into a very different kind of argument.
October 4, 2010, 4:11 pmdirc says:
*Bzzzt*
I’m sorry, but Obion County is part of TN-08, represented by John Tanner (D). It’s State Representative and State Senator are also Democrats.
Thank you for playing, and remember folks, 30 seconds can save you from making your ignorance known to the public!
October 4, 2010, 4:13 pmOrenWithAnE says:
An offer is not a contract.
Of course people are stupid and irrational but what does that have to do with this here?
The fire dept cannot put out fires if it does not balance its books. Ensuring that it remains solvent is just as critical a component of alleviating suffering as training, capital acquisition or actual response.
The dollar represents the value in the universe (that humans are capable of bringing to bear), not is that value.
Those are benefits of a government-run system, which is distinct from a universal one. A (set of) government-run system(s) can be opt-in (and/or offer services at a spot price) and still be professional.
Why not contract it in advance, exactly? If there’s no fire, you don’t pay anything, the rest is spelled out. You can explicitly say that you (do not) authorize your (wife/neighbor/mailman) to incur the charges specified in the table below …
October 4, 2010, 4:15 pmruuffles says:
That answers one question
They are not so callous as to not rescue lives (though I wonder about the FD in Don Miller’s comment a couple above). It’s like the ER, but with human lives and property in place of emergency and non-emergency.
October 4, 2010, 4:15 pmruuffles says:
Sigh. The county commissioners are the ones who actually make the these decisions (Tanner votes on federal legislation, and the state guys vote on state legislation). Every seat there is Republican.
http://www.obiongop.com/?page_id=85
October 4, 2010, 4:18 pmwfjag says:
While I agree that the information was available, I’m not sure that some of the comments show that people read that far down in the story, or have thought through to the consequences of arguments they make.
From the original post:
There are, however, several fire departments in Obion County. But, they are organized on a city by city basis. If the county imposes a tax and makes service mandatory, which city is responsible for responding, and by what authority does a county government impose obligations on a city’s or cities’ individual fire departments? And, what assurance, if any, will there be that the tax or mandatory fee charged by the county will cover the costs incurred by a city in providing fire protection? It is in the interest of the county officials to charge as little as possible, although that leaves the cities with either raising taxes on their residents to subsidize the shortfall or cutting services to cities residents to reduce the cities’ costs.
The county can, of course, organize a county fire department that operates outside the cities, but, an issue there is whether the cost would be more or less than the subscription that non-city residents are charged by city fire departments in order to secure coverage.
Or, you can expect that lenders will be aware that county residents are not covered unless a subscription is paid, and simply add that cost to the mortgage payment, and pay the subscription fee along with the county property taxes and title insurance.
So, there are several mechanisms for addressing the issue. Some of the comments, however, seem to ignore that in lieu of a conclusion based on sympathy for poor Mr. and Mrs. Cranick, who tried to get by on the cheap, and lost their bet.
Also, Day Break asked what happened if a life was endangered. Apparently, the City of South Fulton FD would have responded to a fire threatening a life, if that had been the facts. And, there appears to be a county-wide volunteer rescue department. So, it appears that county-wide EMS services are addressed.
As you will note, I saw nothing wrong under the facts (that there was only a threat to property and no threat to life) with the fire department refusing to fight the fire.
Additionally, some of the commenters have raised an analogy between fire protection and insurance and health insurance. The same sort of issue is already playing out because of Obamacare. See, e.g., Insurers ordered to defend halting new “child-only” coverage, Louisville Courier-Journal (Sept. 28, 2010):
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20100928/BUSINESS/309280028/1008/NEWS01/Insurers+ordered+to+defend+halting+new+“child-only”+coverage
So, should the insurers be forced to accept child only policies covering seriously ill or hospitalized children – which results in the premiums of their other policy-holders being raised to cover the cost, or should the insurers be allowed to stop issuing child only policies, so that such children end up in the state’s high-risk pool and the cost is subsidized by the taxpayers?
Unlike the facts of the news article, there is a potential risk to lives. Without insurance, the uninsured children will have to depend on hospitals that accept Medicare/Medicaid (since, as a condition of that, the hospitals have to agree to treat anyone who comes there, whether or not they have insurance). However, this again throws the matter onto the state’s taxpayers (since the federal government does not provide any reimbursement to providers who treat uninsured patients), and, one consequence is that quite a few hospitals have closed their ERs and only accept admissions from physicans who have staff privileges.
In all cases, it is clear that someone pays for the services — fire protection or health insurance for children. What usually isn’t squarely faced are the consequences of the decisions on how those costs are allocated.
October 4, 2010, 4:18 pmBen P says:
Having looked it up, it’s a very curious district. It’s more similar to the districts in Arkansas that produce conservative democrats than it is to most of the other districts in tennessee.
Tennessee 8th
October 4, 2010, 4:18 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Welker, you seem to be confused about who the relevant actor here. Conservatives didn’t set the fire.
October 4, 2010, 4:19 pmDeanS says:
It appears that you believe the ‘personal responsibility’ is a misguided notion, is that correct?
Also, an unqualified statement “..that it is morally wrong to allow people to suffer..” is astounding in its lack of rationality. I am unable to come up a single, major believe system that has this as one of it basic principles. Even Jainism doesn’t go that far.
Dean
October 4, 2010, 4:20 pmJohn A. Fleming says:
This thread has pointed out a number of actions that the good people of Obion County could take to attempt to avoid a repeat of this public danger. They do not need their intellectual betters to mandate a solution for them. They will decide in their own good time, and will have to bear the consequences of their decisions. All is well.
As the made men in the protection racket know full well, you gotta burn down a corner grocery every once in a while. A couple more incidents where the free-rider skinflint amateur firemen lose their house, and maybe even the wife and kids, and the people will fix the problem. Until then, leave them in peace, don’t “erect a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” And don’t impose “Taxes on us without our Consent”. Them’s fightin’ words.
Some say it’s irrational for the fire dept to let the free rider’s house burn (as long as the wife and kids are safe). That it’s an irrational and needless destruction of value. I say it’s rational for the fire dept, they want to expand their mission and coverage area, the best way to convince the public is to make sure the public is fully aware of the horrors of uncontrolled ex/sub/urban fires. And it’s value that never was anyway. The tightwads of Obion County are actually suppressing property values for everyone. Everybody’s seen the real estate selling point that the schools, fire, and police are excellent. Would-be buyers look elsewhere when the fire protection is known to be sketchy.
October 4, 2010, 4:23 pmTed says:
Lighting strike? I was, of course, changing the facts of this case. But not in an outlandish or unreasonable way. Instead of a barrel fire, a lightening strike starts the fire on Uninsured Property A and spreads to Insured Property B, but only because A does not subscribe to fire protection. Is owner of Property A liable to property owner B under a negligence theory?
The problem is that damage to Property B was completely preventable by stopping the fire on Property A. Apply that to healthcare. Young & Uninsured A gets sick with ebola. Does not seek treatment (or treatment is refused) because A has no insurance. A’s ebola spreads to Old Insured B, who dies of ebola despite insurance, and despite thousands of dollars in treatment, because his body is too old fight it off. Isn’t it better to just treat A to prevent C’s death? It’s not like the damage to C is reparable via torts.
Libertarians need to respond to this very serious flaw. The whole purpose of socialized services is to distribute the cost of an important service efficiently. Now that often creates freeloaders, but I will accept the cost of covering freeloaders when it prevent additional damage to non-freeloaders.
October 4, 2010, 4:24 pmptt says:
I should have pointed out that I was referring to the fire victim’s son assaulting the fire chief.
So… do you suppose the son is an Anarchist or a Tea Partier?
October 4, 2010, 4:26 pm1040 says:
fail. as somebody pointed out how this particular county voted in 2008 – 67-33 in favor of mccain. huge margin in favor of R. reading is fundamental, my friend. thank you for playing!
October 4, 2010, 4:30 pmD.T. says:
A clarification. The neighbors show up to help fight the fire. They don’t pay a call charge. Only the person that called is charged, no matter where the fire originates.
D.T.
October 4, 2010, 4:31 pmMike P Wagner says:
The “free rider” issue appears to be pretty extensive, and renders many much libertarian discourse to the realm of “thought experiment” for me.
For example, suppose a “private choice” option were implemented for Social Security, through which people could opt out of Social Security (neither paying into Social Security nor receiving payments).
My own dismal reading of human nature is that many (if not most) folks who opt out would either not invest, or invest so poorly as to generated incomes far lower than SSN benefits. My empirical evidence for this reading is the small number of people in my age group (who are generally not covered by pension plans) who are 10-15 years away from retirement and have anything like adequate 401(k) savings.
What behavior do you expect from folks who opt out, and then find that they have no income when they are no longer able to work?
If you expect those folks to accept responsibility for their actions, then I think you are delusional.
I think that every one one of those who opted out will say and vote the equivalent of
It will be argued by someone that the folks who didn’t “opted out” should still get benefits (e.g. “the current economic circumstances were unforeseeable”). And the folks who opted out (and their kids who don’t to support them) will vote for whoever makes that argument.
Were we to go forward with privatizing Social Security,in the end – in my opinion – the folks who “opt out” on paying the SS taxes would “opt in” on collecting the benefits when they can no longer work.
I don’t see a solution to this “free rider” dilemma. Since contracts for future votes cannot be enforced, there is no means to prevent someone from opting out of paying for a service today (perhaps in the hope that the service will not be needed), and then voting to require that those services be required by government decades later (when it turns out the service was actually needed).
That kind of thinking makes me suspect that libertarianism in the end is utoptian. I very much enjoy reading libertarian thinking, but I don’t foresee a change in human nature such that a man will quietly starve in old age because he asserted at 30 that he would assume responsibility for feeding himself in his old age.
I would argue that in fact, the “house burning down” is a fairly benign “free rider” example – because so few houses actually burn down. But almost everyone who doesn’t die gets old, and wants to stop working. Many, many folks who elect not to get health insurance get sick (and don’t have the assets to pay for their care).
As long as people can vote for benefits they did not pay for, I am skeptical about most libertarian claims about “small government”.
I am sincerely skeptical, not convinced. How does libertarianism deal with the human proclivity of assuming “I thought they’d come out and put it out, even if you hadn’t paid your $75′ – or mote importantly voting that into being?
October 4, 2010, 4:31 pmCalderon says:
The Liberal says:
Preach on, brother. I have heard rumors that, in these very United States, there are people who do not devote their every waking moment to savings the lives and property of the starving in Africa and other third world nations. They are willing to sacrifice lives and property so that they can eat more than Ramen noodles, live in more than 100 square feet of space, spend time and money watching movies and TV, waste time commenting on blogs and running solo law practices, and engage in other dastardly deeds. All while fellow humans beings die in agony because they can’t be bothered to sacrifice such frivolities. But you and I know the truth — you’re either Mother Teresa, or you’re Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot.
October 4, 2010, 4:34 pmOrenWithAnE says:
So long as the cost of covering freeloaders (or taxing everyone) is less than the damage to the paying. In this case, you could easily insure every subscriber in the county against ‘excess damage caused to an insured property from a fire spread from an uninsured property if timely intervention in the latter could have prevented the former’ for peanuts.
October 4, 2010, 4:34 pmfederal white collar criminal says:
You are thinking of moral hazard, not adverse selection. Moral hazard is when people who are insured take fewer precautions to avoid the harm, because they do not bear the cost of the harm.
Adverse selection is when the pricing structure of the insurance makes it so that only those who are most likely to experience the harm will purchase the insurance. As a result, it costs more per person to cover each insured person, so the insurer needs to further raise the premium, making it even less attractive to low-risk individuals, and so on, until reaching an undesirable equilibrium.
So, if it costs $75 for the insurance but the spot fee is $7500, the a risk-neutral person would forgo the insurance if the probability of his or her house catching on fire is less than 1%. People are generally mildly risk averse, so it might get you a little lower in real life.
I would also take issue with the idea that there isn’t any moral hazard because people try to avoid burning their houses down for other reasons. People generally do avoid doing so, but they also have a lot of choices, such as where they put structures on their property and how much they spend on things like wiring, etc., that impact how likely fire damage is.
That said, in most situations, it would seem that the externalities of fires spreading would far outweigh any moral hazard problems with doing this through taxation. But, as pointed out in comments above, there could be places where that’s not true, such as very sparsely populated rural areas.
October 4, 2010, 4:39 pm1040 says:
i’d bet he’s one of the 67% that voted for mccain. y’know if he cared enough about voting, that is. otherwise, he probably would have voted for mccain if he was willing to get off his couch.
October 4, 2010, 4:39 pmJefferson says:
And yet there are per capita school taxes set up in certain municipalities where each tax paying resident over the age of 18 has to pay a flat fee per annum to fund the school district whether they have children and/or send them to school at all. Some elderly citizens I know who no longer have children in their household have stated that it’s not fair funding a school district when they don’t receive direct benefit from such a tax.
October 4, 2010, 4:39 pmJ says:
I’m amazed at how far this thread got before anyone observed that this arrangement is pretty common in rural areas (and not just in the south); an interesting display of reader demographics. I’ve never heard of a VFD being sued (at least not successfully) over refusal to respond. I like the lien idea though, because it’s always possible there’s an error in the payment records.
“not in Texas, I think, due to our generous homestead exemption”
Could the fire department argue that the property was obtained by fraud if the property owner failed to insure in the manner required by the mortgage? I’m pretty sure you can take a homestead in Texas if it was obtained fraudulently or by other criminal means (that’s why it was so critical to get a conviction on Ken Lay). That of course assumes the property was mortgaged.
October 4, 2010, 4:40 pmChrisTS says:
Oren with an E:
I may be misunderstanding this, but are you suggesting that somehow a fire dept/service be maintained only through payments for responding to ‘actual’ fires? Apart from a certain hint of moral hazard, this seems unlikely to succeed – or, at least, to succeed if we want a good fire service.
October 4, 2010, 4:42 pmTed says:
Ok. What if that representation doesn’t square with what most people think should be the value of the good in question? For instance, how much is a child’s health worth in dollars:
Surely there is an economic answer. But doesn’t it make you a bit queasy to think that a child’s health is not worth $100/pp per month? Most people pay more than that for HD TV.
October 4, 2010, 4:52 pmwhit says:
maybe he owned the house. no insurance required if you own it.
October 4, 2010, 4:52 pmneurodoc says:
Do we know the answers to the following: i) what % of Obion County homeowners pay the annual fee for fire protection services?; ii) did the Cranicks have a mortgage on their house? I ask the former just to get a sense of how many risk-takers there are in those parts, and the latter because I think most mortgagees require the mortgagor to have homeowner’s insurance. Homeowner’s insurance may be different than paying for actual fire protection services from Fulton’s fire department, and I should think the homeowner’s carrier would require their insureds to pay the $75 rather than take on the added risk.
If we knew what the Cranick family’s house was worth, we could see what they implicitly calculated the probability to be of a loss to fire.
Isn’t what happened in Obion County exactly what happened in colonial days, when one chose to pay or not pay for fire protection? If they paid, they got one of those fire medallions to display on the outside of their house to let the fire company know they had done so?
October 4, 2010, 4:53 pmwhit says:
that’s a different argument. the argument is that educating our nation’s youth benefits everybody. whether or not you agree. it’s a different argument than fire protection.
October 4, 2010, 4:54 pmdirc says:
And voted 56% to 44% for Democrat State Rep. Judy Barker over Republican Bill Sanderson in the same election. Huge margin in favor of D. Reading is indeed fundamental, my friend. I think the results for three local races is more indicative than the results for one national race. You will, of course, have a different opinion.
October 4, 2010, 4:55 pmLooking In says:
It’s interesting, but not surprising. The vast majority of the population is urban.
If lives had been at stake, I’d have expected the department to respond to the free rider’s emergency. But lives weren’t at stake. Nor is there any indication that the free rider is too poor to pay. He’s just one of those cheapskates who thought he could get away with it. Wrong-o, buddy!
The department’s policy is to fight fires on non-subscriber’s property, but only to the extent that they pose a danger to a subscriber’s property. Makes perfect sense to me. In this case, the fire that started at the subscriber-neighbor’s house was a grass fire that was easily contained.
Folks, this isn’t some kind of liberal-conservative morality play. It’s an older story of the free rider, played out on a particular stage unfamiliar to urban dwellers.
October 4, 2010, 4:57 pmDon Miller says:
One of the interesting situations in the US is, because of numerous reasons (building codes, fire codes, fire prevention training, smoke alarms etc) the number of building fires per capita is way down.
Many small departments only get a handful of big fires per year. Big commercial fires where they need lots of equipment are even rarer. Trying to run the fire department based on fire revenue only would not be very successful.
For example, because of the size of some of the schools and businesses in my hometown, My fire department needs the capacity to flow 6,000 gallons per minute of water on the initial response. That requires us to own 4 vehicles with 1500GPM pumps. New, a good engine is around $300,000 now. We buy a new one ever 7 years and retire the oldest one when it is almost 30 years old. It costs $5250 per SCBA (air pack), We have 24 of them. It costs $2000 per firefighter to equip them with bunker gear. We have 30 firefighters. Even if it isn’t damaged, we now have to replace it every 10 years. Add it maintenance, repairs, hose, etc, we are just scraping buy on a $150,000 per year budget. Last year, we had 6 good size house fires. So far this year, we have had 4 house fires.
So on average, we would need to recover, $25,000-$35,000 per house fire to keep our doors open and we operating on a cost recovery model. That would be a significant barrier to entry for someone trying to get a new department off the ground. They wouldn’t necessarily need 4 brand new fire trucks, maybe they would go the used market, but that requires more frequent replacement.
We do contract out on Federal Wildland fires. In 2007, we made over $100,000. We used that money to build a training facility. It is the only live-burn training facility in 100 miles of my town.
October 4, 2010, 5:04 pmJefferson says:
Certain public services don’t make good business or economic sense when operated in private or semi-private fashion. For instance, there’s water delivery or the sewer works. There’s no point in duplicating underground pipes when there’s already a working set of pipes in the neighborhood. If two competing water companies were in the same town and/or vicinity, what is the point in the added infrastructure?
Granted, there’s competing services with regards to mail and package delivery in this country, but it’s illegal to offer a similar first-class delivery at a cheaper price than the federally-instituted postal system.
October 4, 2010, 5:04 pmRed says:
This is a city fire department that offers optional services to residents outside the city in the same county.
The South Fulton Fire Department is funded by a combination of tax-dollars from in-city residents and opt-in fees from some county residents.
I see no reason to assume that a fee-for-service model would necessarily fail.
October 4, 2010, 5:06 pmAJ says:
If you elected to not pay the $75 fee and proceeded on a prohibitive fee-for-service arrangement (say $1000 response plus any equipment utilization charge), would you need to stay on the line and wait for your credit card to clear for them to respond….would it be C.O.D….or would it be “by agreement” charged to your local taxes? Dare we consider the prospect of simultaneous fires erupting…the mind boggles.
It would seem that like funding schools, this should not be an opt out system….as the safety of the neighborhood will ultimately lead back to home values. If your block is a notoriously libertarian zone with uncertain fire protection service, then your home value takes a hit. Of course if fee for service can be made workable…..it seems that not responding is not in the best interest of the guy’s neighbors.
October 4, 2010, 5:07 pmLooking In says:
@Don Miller
Your posts in this thread have been really informative. Thank you for them.
@Everyone Else
It’s not about whether the district is represented by a Democrat or a Republican, or whether they voted for McCain. That so many people would see it that way is a sign of how ridiculously hyper-politicized things have gotten.
October 4, 2010, 5:08 pmLooking In says:
@AJ, in this case, there was no “neighborhood.” It was a fire in a rural area, not a town, and there was no threat to life. The subscriber neighbor suffered a small grass fire, immediately squelched by the department.
The story is NOT about a subscriber-based urban department. Did you even bother to read what actually happened?
October 4, 2010, 5:12 pmLucia says:
That page says “This is a list of every elected representative serving Obion County ” and gives us no indication of party affiliation. It doesn’t say it’s a list of all the republican elected officials. Do you have information to suggest they are all republicans? Or is the “sigh” sufficient evidence that they are all republicans?
Wikipedia happens to say, “Historically, the 8th is a strongly Democratic district. Along with the 5th and 9th districts, it is usually not seriously contested by Republicans. Much of the territory in the district has not been represented by a Republican in over a century.”
October 4, 2010, 5:15 pmLooking In says:
In economic terms, fire service is a natural monopoly in urban areas. There are other natural monopolies: city streets, sewers, utility grids. In rural areas with lower population densities, the natural monopolies might still exist (for instance, I doubt it makes sense to have competing county fire services in a thinly-populated area), but not necessarily any requirement to subscribe to them as a condition of living there.
October 4, 2010, 5:16 pmThe Liberal says:
You really are dumb. As usual. You know I don’t share your basic amoral worldview, so quit replying to me as if I do.
If you stand there and watch a house burn down and someone dies when you could easily put the fire out with minimal risk, you are as morally bad as many murderers and morally worse than others.
Got it. We share different basic assumptions.
That you believe messed up things like that you have no obligation whatsoever to do what you can to help others when you are well positioned to do so or that you believe that truth is a secondary consideration in judicial proceedings makes you a wacko deviant.
So, quit replying to my comments as if I missed something when the real difference is that I am not completely amoral and a disgrace to the human race like yourself. Or to put it differently, where my assumptions are fundamentally different than yours.
See, the difference between me and you, is I don’t think it is okay to be a sociopath. You: “Oh, but I didn’t cause X. I just didn’t do anything about X when I could have easily done so because I am a disgrace to the human race.”
Or to put it in a way that even you can understand:
I think that causing X sometimes makes one more culpable. (Sometimes not.) However, even in cases where causing X would make you more culpable, doing nothing when you are well positioned to do something sometimes is nearly just as bad. (And sometimes it is worse.)
Got it? I didn’t think so. You obviously are not capable of understanding this basic difference in our worldviews, as illustrated by your “meaningful” comments where you say I “missed” something when the real issue is that I do not attach the same value to that thing as would a sociopath like yourself. But at least I tried.
October 4, 2010, 5:19 pmDon Miller says:
One of the things that people don’t realize sometimes is that Rural firefighting and Suburban/Urban firefighting requires a different mix of equipment.
Because of our population density, building construction, and fire hydrants, my town is classified as a suburban fire department. We have trucks with big pumps and 5″ hoses to connect to fire hydrants. We don’t carry much water on board our engines because we have hydrants everywhere in the community. Because all of our roads are paved, we don’t have any 4 wheel drive fire trucks.
The rural fire department that covers the area around my town uses trucks with smaller pumps. They have specialized trucks (water tenders) to do water shuttles to supply water for fire fighting operations. It doesn’t make sense for them to have the big pumps because they can’t shuttle water fast enough to use that kind of capacity. A lot of their roads aren’t paved. So they have a lot of 4-wheel drive vehicles. They fight a lot of brush fires so they have specialized trucks just for brush fires. They have a lot of small pumps to help them get water from streams, ponds, swimming pools, if they are available.
I am sure that the subscription fees in this case are used to make sure the department has the right kind of equipment to effectively fight rural fires that isn’t required if they were fighting fire in their own community. Problem with a cost-recovery method is that the department/community has to buy this equipment in advance.
October 4, 2010, 5:20 pmgeorge weiss says:
ok true-this is a good example of why extreme libertarianism is bad
but very few libertarians out there will deny the need for some taxes and services-and specifically will mention as examples police and courts and national defense (needed to enforce the very contracts the private market system advocated by libertarians would need). i don’t see why fire protection should not also be in that category.
October 4, 2010, 5:23 pmThe Liberal says:
Expecting a minimum level of human decency is not the same as requiring you to be Mother Teresa.
Or, to put it another ways. Avoiding the sacrificing of lives and property (even though avoiding such sacrifices is value maximizing) in the name of ideology doesn’t require one to become Mother Teresa. It requires one to have a basic level of human decency.
October 4, 2010, 5:26 pmJefferson says:
State police is another odd monopoly in some rural areas. A township or consortium might have too small of a population base to justify local police authority, so they rely on the state police to solely patrol the area. Unfortunately, at times, that means small, petty crimes that don’t involve any risk for harm or life endangerment tends to go unenforced. Granted, I’m sure such criminal activity does not necessarily go unnoticed either…
October 4, 2010, 5:28 pmrmd says:
OK, here’s a thought. How ’bout you call up the Fulton, TN fire department and get a list of all the homeowners in Obion County who have chosen not to pay the $75/year. (It’s probably a much shorter list than it was last week.) Then you can pay the fee for each of them. Or, if there are many, take up a collection from others who agree with you. Several of them have posted comments here so it shouldn’t be very hard to find them. Then you can have your moral superiority; you’ll have paid for it yourself. Until then, stop trying to claim it on someone else’s dime.
October 4, 2010, 5:45 pmTony Sidaway says:
That’s a classic. This is why libertarianism will always be a hobby of rich kids who have never known what it means to be poor and helpless. You need a properly funded government, no pussyfooting.
October 4, 2010, 5:45 pmNathan says:
I haven’t read all the comments, but a search found no mention of an analogous situation in maritime law that is handled quite well. When a ship is damaged and needs a tug to get safely to harbor, there is no time for negotiations, as water keeps pouring in every second. And as in the case here, most ships don’t have “tug insurance” guaranteeing them a safe tow to shore in the event of emergency. The way it is handled is that tugs are entitled to their normal and customary rates for towing a ship to safety, taking into account the size of the ship, the danger, the distance towed, etc. Any other solution is extremely inefficient. If you allow free “negotiations,” you have the Marcus Crassus situation where the boat owner (or insurer, more likely) is willing to pay almost the entirety of the cost of the ship rather than lose it all. Also, it encourages rent seeking, in the form of too many tugs cruising around looking for a damaged ship to save.
Setting the price ahead of time means there’s no legal wrangling over the seriousness of promises made during duress, but the tug operator still has the proper incentives to rescue ships, knowing he’ll get fair compensation, albeit not a windfall.
(Note–I remember reading about this in a law text book once; I have no cites available.)
October 4, 2010, 5:59 pmohwilleke says:
It is rare for rural lots to be less than 5 acres, and frequently they are 35 acres or more.
October 4, 2010, 5:59 pmohwilleke says:
How so? The fire department doesn’t have a profit motive, and if they are coming to the scene in response to a citizen call mediated by a 9-1-1 dispatcher that there is a fire that requires their attention, the risk of false positive calls is surely not particularly great. A fire department could commit too many resources to a particular fire, but risks having hell to pay if it can deal with another fire that arises at the same time as a result.
October 4, 2010, 6:03 pm1040 says:
by this logic health insurance also should be. and before you know it, voila we have soviet russia.
October 4, 2010, 6:05 pmohwilleke says:
The law of unjust enrichment exists to solve this problem, and has been around since at least the time of the Roman Empire. There is more to private law than torts and contracts.
October 4, 2010, 6:08 pm1040 says:
Hey, how did ya guess? Given the ideological similarity of local Ds and Rs, the national election provides a much clearer lens to illuminate the kind of ideological differences as well as inconsistency underlying this incident.
October 4, 2010, 6:13 pm1040 says:
there is a difference between police and fire. the former enforces the laws and protects negative rights. protection from fire is a positive right.
October 4, 2010, 6:15 pmohwilleke says:
Few houses burn down because of building codes and fire departments. Before those were in place, fires that burned down whole neighborhoods and cities were a quite common occurrence. In the arid West out of control wildfires that burn down houses if firefighters don’t stop them remain routine.
In a humid environment where houses are too far from each other to spread, the public interest in preventing a house from burning down is admittedly not as great as in urban environments and arid areas.
October 4, 2010, 6:18 pmwhit says:
as a former firefighter myself, I may have insight in this area. firefighters USED to primarily fight fires. with modern sprinkler systems, fire safety, etc. (especially in cities), firefighters much more commonly spend their time on medical calls, search and rescue, collision response (JAWS OF LIFE, snipping power cables from batteries, etc.) etc. etc. the average firefighter spends very little of his time fighting fires, and far more doing medical stuff, etc. in some areas, they also do a lot of inspections for code violation, etc. fires are very rare, but also very devastating when they happen. firefighters and fires are kind of like cops and officer involved shootings. it’s a part of their job that is glamorized, but is actually very rare. however, WHEN it happens it is often life or death, etc.
October 4, 2010, 6:20 pmwhit says:
in the state i live in, the state patrol does not do that. they are almost exclusively highway cops. it is the county sheriff who provides law enforcement for these type of situations, EXCEPT they do it by contract. small towns (and some quite sizable cities) contract with the local sheriff for the sheriff to provide law enforcement. this is also the case in california. LA sheriff for instance provides police services for many cities in LA county that do not have police forces. iirc, for example, compton USED to have their own PD but are now serviced by LA county sheriff. CHP are “concrete commandos”. traffic cops. MA is a state where state cops provide services to some small towns.
October 4, 2010, 6:28 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Sure, if we had some magic way to fix only what actually causes a disaster. But unfortunately, not knowing in advance where and how disaster will strike, we have to fix every possible cause of disaster. For every fix that prevents a disaster, there will be thousands that do not. Or, put more simply, the cost of avoiding this problem is not $75, but the cost of providing fire protection to everyone uninsured.
If one home in 3,000 burns down each year, the cost of avoiding one house burning down is not $75 but $225,000. You would have to buy fire protection on 3,000 homes to expect to stop one from burning down. Now it’s not so clear it’s such a good deal.
October 4, 2010, 6:29 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Protection of one’s negative rights is a positive right.
October 4, 2010, 6:31 pmDjDiverDan says:
Yes – sort of like Hobbe’s “state of Nature” – “nasty, short and brutish.” Why is it so many people insist that it is just plain stupid not to believe in the theory of evolution, but at the same time insist upon every social policy they can think of to prevent evolution’s natural (and desireable) effect on the human race?
Libertarianism isn’t looking for a Utopia – it’s looking for a world (or a country, a state, any political subdivision) in which individual freedom to make one’s own choices free of government coercion is maximized; the essential correlative to maximizing freedom is insisting upon personal responsibility for the natural and foreseeable consequences of one’s choices. If Mr. Crannick is too stupid to see that, for him, refusing to pay $75.00 for fire protection is a very poor choice, then we are all better off if he serves as a reminder to others that the consequences of bad choices may be harsh, and society will allow those consequences to fall where they may.
October 4, 2010, 6:32 pmTed says:
Explain further?
October 4, 2010, 6:39 pmsecond history says:
I agree with The Liberal’s arguments. The county (and the voters) are just being cheap by not having a county fire department, and this has resulted in uneven fire protection. The property tax rate in Obion County has declined from $2.58 in 1999 (per $100 of assessed value) to $1.95 in 2009, a 31% decline.
If this is such a great system, why not have it apply to police protection or EMT services? I have very little sympathy for any party in this instance-the victim, the neighbor, the city or the county. The city has no obligation to provide fire protection to the unincorporated area, unless they have a mutual aid agreement with county. As long as the voters don’t want to pay for comprehensive fire protection, I say let them all burn.
October 4, 2010, 6:42 pmTed says:
Natural selection? Are you in favor of Hobbes’s State of Nature, or do you want something more comfortable and secure? If not, are you saying that the fire department should not even respond to fires that threaten life? I mean, it’s their own silliness that started the fire, right? Better for the gene pool and all that jazz.
If that’s not what you mean, which I hope it isn’t, then extend the reasoning that justifies intervention to save life to intervention to save property and see how it works (cost/benefit analysis). I think it would work just fine in this case to mandate subscriptions through taxes. It might not work in others.
October 4, 2010, 6:54 pmColoComment says:
We’re talkin’ roughly $0.20 a day here, folks, for fire department coverage. Which is probably a cheaper daily cost than the light bulbs he burns.
Mr. Crannick was “penny wise and pound foolish,” and does anyone want to bet that he’ll again forego paying the fee for his rebuilt house? Anyone?
October 4, 2010, 6:55 pmguy in the veal calf office says:
Does the fire department solely fund itself by $75 fees and City of Fulton taxes? Or has it recieved county, state or federal funds?
October 4, 2010, 6:56 pmPeter says:
@Nathan “no mention of an analogous situation in maritime law that is handled quite well …”
That depends on the country and leads to some interesting situations. When I use to sail in Croatia I always agreed (and was explicitly told by the staff) when I rented a sailboat that under no circumstances was I to accept help if I foundered and was simply to watch the ship sink even if a tug was ten meters away and the boat was savable. When I asked around (I just assumed the boats were simply stolen) it seems in Croatia (I never researched this) that the rescuer gets an automatic lien on the boat (something like 20% of it’s value) if they respond to a request for help (and insurance won’t cover this lien) whereas insurance will cover the entire boat if she sinks to the bottom.
October 4, 2010, 7:03 pmOwen H. says:
So what happens if our “free loader” tells the dispatch (falsely) that there is someone trapped in his non-subscribed home, and the firefighter come out to save them, enter for rescue, and one or more of the responders dies looking for a nonexistent victim?
I think most liberals who are saying he deserved it are doing so ironically, using it to point out the flaw in the system. Me, I think that fire service should be mandated, and paid for. It does not simply protect the owner, but all of the neighbors as well. Talk on how big lots are really doesn’t mean much; after all, if a fire gets going on a fairly large plot, it becomes that much harder to stop when it finally crosses over to a covered property.
October 4, 2010, 7:03 pmJohn A. Fleming says:
$75/year for fire protection is dirt cheap protection. Any homeowner in America, no matter how poor, can afford it. There’s no excuse. (And if you are renting, by law the owner shall pay). The only reason not to pay is that you are a foolish cheapskate bad neighbor skinflint. If your house burns down, you deserved it. But your neighbors didn’t. The names of all these unneighborly dopes should be up on the County website, and known by all the neighbors.
The problem is, of course, that somebody who’s that foolish and cheap usually acts … primitively when his neighbors come knocking. Perhaps what the County should do is hire a uniformed Fire Marshal, who then pays the holdouts an occasional friendly visit, and perhaps even a fire safety inspection.
October 4, 2010, 7:10 pmrpt says:
Except for the use of the taxpayer-supported “government” court system.
October 4, 2010, 7:26 pmCalderon says:
Do you have the “basic level of human decency” to donate all the time you don’t spend working or on basic human necessities, as well as all your money beyond the bare minimum to live, to starving people in less developed countries? If not, you’re not avoiding the sacrifices of lives and so are horribly immoral. I’m disappointed, I thought you were Mother Theresa.
October 4, 2010, 7:32 pmChrisTS says:
Red:
My query to OrenWithAnE was not limited to the specifics of this case [as I am not sure his suggestion was].
As Don Miller points out, fire services have to be realtively well-supported to be effective when the time comes. A subsrciber only program would not work unless the annual fees were quite hefty.
I also wonder about the ‘this is rural’ meme. The pictures suggest that Mr Cranick’s (sp?) house was not all that far from his neighbor’s. ‘Rural’ does not always mean ‘all houses are at great distances from one another.’
October 4, 2010, 7:40 pmLooking In says:
If someone lies to the dispatcher, then you nail him to the cross for it. Financially and maybe criminally.
This (relatively) liberal guy isn’t saying anyone “deserved it.” I’m saying that Crannick, and no one else, is culpable. It’s too bad his house burned down. I wouldn’t wish that on him or anyone else. But it was not the fire department’s job to put it out. It was Crannick’s job to take care of it. He didn’t pay his local fire insurance, so he was on his own. His choice, no one else’s.
That’s what freedom is about. You want to be free of taxes and government encroachment? Fine, but you’d better remember that this coin has two sides.
October 4, 2010, 7:41 pmOwen H. says:
And then said holdout refuses entry, or even uses force to defend his “rights”.
That’s really the problem, isn’t it? People don’t always act rationally. And them there is the problem of what constitutes “rational”. I mean, not paying when you don’t need to sounds rational, doesn’t it?
October 4, 2010, 7:42 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Then hedge it out — go to Barclays, say we need X dollars for the budget and, in exchange, we will assign to you the lien-backed-debt from Y fee schedule where you determine Y.
More abstractly, for every department there is some fee schedule that, on average, produces that revenue. This hold whether you are 100% tax (in which case the fee is budget / taxpayers), 100% fee (budget / average-number-of-fires) or any combination of the above.
People don’t get to merely ‘think’ what should the value be, they have to actually pony up the dollars for it. In Europe, for instance, they don’t merely ‘think’ that a child’s health is worth a large sum, they pay very high taxes to pay for that expensive treatment.
The representation in dollars is just an aggregate measure of that behavior.
I’m sure some investor would then gladly accept a deal where they give you $100k a year (and/or some financing for capital improvements) in exchange for being contractually assigned the right to recover $50k for each house fire. Have them bid the contract in a reverse auction even.
October 4, 2010, 7:42 pmCalderon says:
ohwilleke said:
For the first two questions and second half of the third, under current circumstances, which no one questions, we allow people to take actions that unintentionally kill third parties. Most notably, 40,000 people die annually in car crashes, many as of result of accidents with other vehicles. Most of these deaths occur because we’ve decided to allow people to voluntary drive, and drive the kinds of cars manufactured today (instead of ones limited to 10 miles an hour and covered in berf). Society might theoretically be able to change such that no one could take voluntary actions that endanger others, but it would be a true nanny state unlike anything which we’ve ever seen. As things stand now, we’ve already crossed the threshold of allowing one person’s voluntary acts to endanger third parties, and so that’s not a qualitative reason to deny the voluntary act of not buying fire insurance here. (I’m also guessing the quantitative effects are minimal, but am too lazy to try Googling to see if there are statistics showing how often circumstances such as those in the OP lead to injury or death).
For the third circumstance, I’d say it’s a matter of contract between the payor and the fire fighters and a matter of tort between the fire fighters or the payor and the non-payor. In the actual fact pattern here, the fire fighters responded to the payor quickly enough that controlling the fire wasn’t an issue, and that’s what I’d generally expect to happen.
An interesting legal question (as opposed to a moral one) if Tom Maguire’s post is correct is if Cranick could argue detrimental reliance if he were aware of the policy allowing him to pay $500 for the fire fighters to come out.
October 4, 2010, 7:45 pmTed says:
I agree. So it would be correct to say that Americans value their own children’s health less than Europeans value their own children’s health, right?
I think economics is a spectacular descriptive tool. I also think it is a spectacularly awful prescriptive tool.
October 4, 2010, 7:51 pmLooking In says:
You haven’t bothered to read the coverage of this incident. The local FD has a policy of responding to calls where lives are at stake, even if the fire is at a non-subscriber’s place. This fire endangered property only. Moreover, the FD will go to non-subscriber fires, and if it’s only property at stake, but there’s a subscriber neighbor, they’ll do enough to keep the non-subscriber’s fire from endangering subscribing neighbors.
The only person at fault on this one is the freeloader, Mr. Crannick.
October 4, 2010, 7:56 pmTed says:
But not only was the subscribing neighbor’s property “endangered,” it was actually damaged. It seems the FD did not fulfill its duty as you describe it, thus the FD was also at fault (for the damage to the neighbor’s property).
October 4, 2010, 8:03 pmOwen H. says:
Oh, I see, the FIRE DEPARTMENT was at fault for not acting to prevent the non-subscriber’s fire to damage a subscriber’s property. oy.
October 4, 2010, 8:17 pmChrisTS says:
Calderon:
There is considerable moral distance between sacrificing one’s own life and interests to those in peril and asseerting the absolute distinction between actively harming and not helping.
One may not wish to be a cog in the utility machine, but this does not rule out a sense of obligation to help when doing so is relatively easy.
October 4, 2010, 8:18 pmChrisTS says:
In the instant case, this seems indisputable. Even if we think Obion would have been better off with a tax-supported fire dept., it is Crannick who decided – absent such a system – to not avail himself of [pretty cheap] protection.
October 4, 2010, 8:22 pmPerseus says:
On the contrary. It is a classic case of person A being stupid, who then tries to induce persons B and C to force person D to take care of person A.
October 4, 2010, 8:27 pmLooking In says:
For starters, the damage to the next door neighbor’s property was minimal: a grass fire swiftly doused. Secondly, regardless of the damage, the fault for that damage is the free-rider’s. He was offered local fire insurance, and declined it. Therefore, he was responsible for controlling fire on his premises, including any damage to surrounding property from the spread of that fire.
None of this was the FD’s fault. The only one responsible is Mr. Crannick, who thought he could not pay for fire control, yet rely on it. Sorry, fella, you don’t get to have your cake and eat it too. Who do you think you are, Citibank?
October 4, 2010, 8:31 pmCalderon says:
If it’s all just a matter of degree, I have no problem with that. But then you get into questions of where you draw the lines and how easy or hard certain things are. (Is it really harder for David Welker to give a few thousand dollars to African charities than for the City of Fulton to put out a fire in Obion County for someone who chose not to pay the annual fee for fire protection). And that sort of line drawing and ambiguities — where do we draw the lines between rights and other goals versus the possibility that voluntary choices will result in harm — makes statements like the following even more ridiculous:
October 4, 2010, 8:36 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
I’m not confusing them; I’m just not expressing myself clearly. My point was that with fire coverage, who are the high risk customers, other than the small minority of people who recklessly burn down their houses? Adverse selection is a serious problem in health care because there’s a wide and obvious (to the customer) gap between high risk and low risk customers; the same isn’t the case with house fires. AFAIK.
October 4, 2010, 8:41 pmsilverpie says:
They vote heavily Republican at national level, but heavily Democrat at local level.
(Another oddity–the contract is actually interstate. The City of Fulton is in Kentucky.)
October 4, 2010, 9:36 pmTreberos says:
Give me a break! Totally capable humans with lots of firefighting equipment watched while another humans house and possessions perished in flame. Just what kind of backward-ass thinking allows a mans home to burn to the ground in America while able firefighters stand by and watch? Over $75? Even the Taliban have a higher moral ethic than this. Have the people in this county become so self-righteous and morally bankrupt that they have decided to compete for a place in history to rival Sodom & Gomorrah? This is absolutely abhorrent behavior and am ashamed that Obion County is a part of this great nation. This is not the America that I know. We stand up for each other, we party when things are good, we help each other when things are bad. I’m going to be going back to my planet next week, I can’t wait – ya’ll are assholes!
October 4, 2010, 9:37 pmChris says:
Burn baby burn
October 4, 2010, 9:54 pmLiberty60 says:
A couple of questions spring to mind-
In the 19th century, when fire departments were being organized in cities, there was much the same debate; in the end, publicly financed fire departments won out over private ones not because of moral or ethical concerns, but usually because it was more efficient;
The very nature of the free market is that chaos and destruction are normal- companies make bad decisions, go bankrupt, become inefficient, poorly run and then collapes into mergers and aquisitions, whatever;
While all this “creative destruction” might be a wonderful thing in the software business, it is terrible for things that we want to work perfectly 24/7, such as emergency services.
It is equally possible that someday a call to the Obion County 911 will result in the following message:
“Sorry, the Fire Department is closed under Chapter 11 reorganization- please call another time, and have a nice day”.
I wonder, if the fire department was financed with taxes spread over the entire populace, would it be more or less than $75 per household?
October 4, 2010, 10:25 pmUsually, forcing everyone into the pool drives the cost down per capita.
Big Jake says:
“As long as a fireman’s lien has priority over mortgages … collection should not be a problem in the vast majority of cases.”
October 4, 2010, 10:26 pmIf liens had priority, wouldn’t mortgage holders require the subscription fee to be paid as part the mandated homeowner’s insurance, along with the usual 8-months escrow?
OrenWithAnE says:
I think that is correct, although there are other considerations that might be in play.
For instance, if Americans assigned a very large negative value to State involvement in healthcare then they would be more opposed to a European-style single-payer system, even holding the value they assign their childrens’ health constant. Or we could note that many Americans works very hard to get into jobs where they can provide their children with healthcare, so they value it as a matter of personal achievement. If that guy turns around and votes against a public-type plan (or subsidies etc…) then he may assign high value to his own children’s health but not to others’ children.
What I mean by these examples is that the aggregate measurements doesn’t break down so easily into the individual ‘inputs’. We cannot know (although, as I said above, I think you are correct in this instance) that Americans value children’s health less than Europeans — only that in aggregate and given their beliefs about the tradeoffs (which might not be correct, or we might not even know them and they guess differently) what decision they made.
I think people using it for the latter are quite confused by the basic premise.
October 4, 2010, 10:29 pmIspep Teid says:
That’s easy to fix. Simply make the lien override the exemption. If you don’t, that’s also not a problem. The fire department just won’t come because they won’t get anything out of the deal.
October 4, 2010, 10:31 pmKharn says:
Doesn’t help that the private companies would sometimes brawl at the fire scenes to determine who got to bill the owner for putting out the fire, before they put out the fire…
October 4, 2010, 10:32 pmBen says:
If you have a formula for a perfect society where nothing ever goes wrong and no one’s life is ever negatively affected by anyone else, please post it here.
Until then, I certainly prefer the chance that someone might be affected by accident or misfortune, rather than the certainty that he (or one of his neighbors on his behalf) will be harmed by government, either maliciously, through incompetence, as “collateral damage”, or worst of all, for his own good.
Sad things happen. With government involved, sad things happening becomes an institution — one with no escape.
October 4, 2010, 10:37 pmRicardo says:
I agree with everything you wrote aside from this. Why use mafia-style intimidation tactics to get people to cough up $75 when modern civilization provides an even better option known as taxation? Once the people of this county realize that living next to a cheapskate neighbor puts their property in grave danger of burning down, I don’t think they will have a problem with adding $75 to property taxes. Problem solved.
October 4, 2010, 10:47 pmbuddyglass says:
Have two fees. You can pay $75 up front or you can pay $10,000 in the event you chose not to pay the $75 up front and have to call the fire department out to your place. Make every effort to publicize the $10,000 fee; it will probably motivate most people to pay the $75.
Also, make the list of who has and hasn’t paid the $75 public record so that insurance companies have access to it. I guarantee you it will be cheaper to pay $75/year for fire service than it would be to build the increased risk of “your entire house burning to the ground” into the cost of your home insurance.
October 4, 2010, 10:51 pmRicardo says:
What if it costs more than $10,000 to fight a particularly nasty fire? How is the fire department going to collect if the person’s house is uninsured? If the $10,000 debt can be discharged in bankruptcy (and it can), this sounds like a loosing proposition for the fire department, particularly if there are lots of freeloaders who refuse to pay the $75.
October 4, 2010, 11:04 pmrpt says:
I haven’t read the balance of the thread but this seems to the only post that addresses the moral depravity of the firemen letting the house burn and then seeing commenters applauding that result. It reminds me directly of Huckabee’s recent comment that people with preexisting conditions of illness or disability are like burned down houses or wrecked cars. So much for his alleged Christianity or the empty moral center of anyone who thinks this is a “good result”.
October 4, 2010, 11:07 pmOwen H. says:
So you are saying that even those that refuse to pay the taxes or fees required should be protected anyway? Firefighters should risk their lives for someone that couldn’t be bothered to spend $75?
Now me, I think the fire protections system should be payed for with mandatory taxes, so that everyone shares the burden of protecting the community. But maybe that’s just crazy liberal talk.
October 4, 2010, 11:08 pmRicardo says:
This is closer to a Typhoid Mary scenario where one person’s stupidity puts innocent third parties in grave danger. The neighbor of said stupid person A had to wait until the flames had spread to his property before the firefighters would do anything. His house could have suffered severe fire damage because of this.
Needless to say, this system is bad enough in Tennessee but would be deadly if tried in California where catastrophic, rapidly spreading fires are a part of life.
October 4, 2010, 11:24 pmRicardo says:
San Francisco’s Fire Department owns and operates several barges that operate by sucking up massive amounts of water from the San Francisco Bay and blasting it out. These are necessary because the city is earthquake-prone and in a major earthquake, water mains will burst so that fire hydrants will not work while at the same time gas lines will rupture and cause fires. The Marina District right on the northern coast of the city experienced a severe fire during the 1989 earthquake and is almost guaranteed to experience one again in the next earthquake.
Every once in a while, someone proposes for the city to save money by getting rid of these barges that generally don’t do anything in an average year. Then someone has to whip out a history book and flip to the section dealing with 1906.
How would user fees even begin to pay for such a necessary public good without massive amounts of freeloading?
October 4, 2010, 11:43 pmbuddyglass says:
Maintain a record of who’s insured and who isn’t. Don’t respond to fires at residences with no insurance. The $10,000 figure was just off the top of my head. Ideally you’d just bill the insurance company, similar to if the person had a heart attack and called an ambulance. The ambulance would come regardless then bill the insurance company.
Is homeowner’s insurance required? Seems like it is. If so, and if you billed the insurer of property that caught fire but whose owner hadn’t paid for fire service, then insurance for non-payers would be much more expensive. To the extent that everyone would just pay the $75.
October 4, 2010, 11:54 pmDouglas2 says:
(Re: jsmith: I know this has libertarians gushing with glee…)
I don’t see any glee, and I don’t interpret anything above as applauding of the result, except to the extent that others in the county will know for sure that subscription is required for response from fire departments.
There are 8 towns in that county with fire services. between the 8, they find that only 1 in 4 of the building fires they respond to are within their own jurisdictions and tax collecting area, the other 3 out of 4 are in the nearby rural areas.
I’ve read a report that when the fire department responded to the neighboring subscriber, the original house was “fully involved”. Are they still morally depraved for letting it burn out if that is the case?
October 5, 2010, 12:00 amLooking In says:
If it became known that there was no need to pay the $75 because the department would come anyway, how many people do you think would pay? Look, the people of that county have repeatedly voted against a county fire department, and the town department found it impossible to collect a $500 per call fee in at least half the cases. The $75 subscription was the last resort.
The town department will still not ignore life-threatening fires, but they won’t put out a non-subscriber’s fire that only threatens his own property. Oh, and when someone declines to pay the $75 fee, they contact that person by phone to make sure they really don’t want to pay.
Too bad the would-be freeloader’s place burned down, but if he wants to find the culpable party he need only take a stroll over to the nearest mirror and take it up with the idiot he sees staring him in the face. Hope the irresponsible cheapskate had homeowner’s coverage. Or would you expect the Good Hands People to rebuild his house anyway?
October 5, 2010, 12:23 amRicardo says:
So it sounds like the fire department will need to have a database administrator who coordinates with all of the insurance companies in the area as well as the fire department’s own billing department to keep this system running. Presumably, the people who pay the $75 would also be paying said admin’s salary. Why would they do this as opposed to simply voting for a $75 tax hike?
I don’t see why any insurance company would be obligated to pay the fire department unless such a provision is clearly stated in the insurance contract. Instead, I could see insurance companies denying coverage to people who refuse to pay the $75.
Which is fine except for the fact that fires sometimes have a tendency to spread very rapidly and, as I mentioned before, it can be very dangerous to let a fire just burn by itself. If you are in a rural area then maybe there is no problem if there is not enough surrounding vegetation to spread the fire (e.g. not coastal California). Otherwise, someone who refuses to pay is putting his neighbors in direct danger.
October 5, 2010, 12:26 amLooking In says:
It’d be interesting to know if the freeloader had homeowner’s insurance. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that he owned the place free and clear and didn’t have it. People who are stupidly cheap in one area tend to be stupidly cheap in other areas.
October 5, 2010, 12:34 amRicardo says:
Interesting. Apparently, the locals are outraged that the fire department still did not respond and someone apparently assaulted a fire fighter in retaliation!
Ridiculous. Of course, if the voters want the fire department to respond the solution is very simple — reverse their previous decision and sign a contract with the city for complete coverage funded by a property tax hike. If they don’t want higher taxes, then some of them clearly need to grow up and learn to live with the consequences of their actions.
October 5, 2010, 12:37 amLooking In says:
Oh please. You truly don’t understand small towns, rural areas, or people at all. Yeah, who’s going to collect the insurance information and keep it current? Oh, and you’re going to be happier if they don’t respond to fires at the homes of the uninsured than you are now?
You ask if homeowners insurance is required. The answer is only if someone’s got a mortgage. If they own it free and clear, there’s no requirement to insure it.
October 5, 2010, 12:38 amLooking In says:
SOME of the locals are mad. The assault was committed by a member of the would-be freeloader’s family, and he’s been charged with a felony. The county’s voters have repeatedly rejected taxpayer-funded fire departments, so this is what happens. It’s pretty common in rural areas.
October 5, 2010, 12:42 amJohn A. Fleming says:
Ricardo says I’m advocating mafia-style intimidation tactics on the free riders. That’s not my experience. Everywhere I’ve been, the Fire Marshal is perhaps the most respected official in the County or city. He’s also the most powerful, based on his ability to get people to do what needs to be done. Because he’s seen as non-political, and completely professional, unlike the Mayor, the Councilmen, the Police Chiefs and Sheriffs (who are varying degrees of political).
You’ll get no support from anyone in the neighborhood going up against the Fire Marshal. If the Marshal asks to inspect your property, you step aside and provide unlimited access. If the Marshal tells you to fix something, you hop to it.
(The Fire Marshal does have to work within community norms. In some places, the Marshal is elected. Others, appointed by the Mayor or council. There are limits to the Marshal’s power to affect people’s behavior. But it’s almost always a meritocratic appointment. And the people recognize that.)
Second, Ricardo thinks that taxation for fire services is the one size fits all efficient solution. I’ve lived among country folk, they’re independent, strong-willed, and have lots of opinions. Some of ‘em look out for their neighbors, others just want to be left alone. Getting them to agree about taxes is often very difficult. Sometimes, subscription-based fire protection is the acceptable compromise.
The country folk sometimes have volunteer fire departments. You gain the respect of your neighbors by volunteering. (It’s also a social opportunity, living in the country can be lonesome.) Sometimes, VFD’s don’t work, and people contract with private companies.
Why should all dangers and risk everywhere be ameliorated by coercive governments funded by taxation? There’s joy and meaning in taking care of your family by your own efforts, and associating with your like-minded neighbors. Some people want to live risk free, but that only works if everybody is brought to the same level of risk. Some people prefer to decide for themselves. That’s why they move to the country. It’s a free country, they can do as they please, and our nation will be strong if we leave people to pursue the blessings of Liberty.
October 5, 2010, 5:07 amJohn A. Fleming says:
jsmith says … it is totally, utterly morally wrong to allow people to suffer when you can alleviate their suffering ….
Sometimes, in a free society, you have to let them suffer. It sucks to see it, people suffering the consequences of their actions, and suffering when random tragedy strikes them down. Some day, God forbid, it will be your turn. Let us pray that when that day comes, you/I/we have been saving for it, and cultivating the good will of your family, friends, and neighbors.
As the Dread Pirate Roberts says “Life is pain, Highness”. Suffering is endless, our ability to alleviate it is limited. We must choose when, where, and how much to help.
There are at least two ways to alleviate suffering. Spread the suffering around equally, is the one favored by collectivists of all stripes.
Another way, the blessings of Liberty way, is to let people choose for themselves who and when to help.
The history of the TwenCen left no doubt which allows the most suffering, and which minimizes it. There is no debate, the facts are plain for all to see. Secure the Liberty of the people, and suffering will be minimized.
Nobody wants to have people starving and dying in the streets. There is a clear public good to provide a safety net. But the safety net has to really, really suck, so that everyone works very hard to keep from falling that far. And only a wealthy nation can provide the opportunities for people in the net to climb back up and once again become productive citizens.
October 5, 2010, 5:53 amRicardo says:
Not at all. I said if people living in the isolated countryside really, really want to be exempt from fire protection and there is no flammable vegetation nearby that can cause a fire to rapidly spread, that’s their choice.
I don’t know anything about Obion County, Tennessee but the article notes that the fire spread to a neighbor’s property at which point the fire department intervened. That suggests that the properties are close enough to each other that a fire on one property poses a risk to surrounding lots. And it is at that point that fire protection becomes a necessary public good.
October 5, 2010, 5:57 amPerseus says:
It may not be a “good” result, but it is a just result.
It might be a potentially relevant externality or even a Pareto-relevant externality (as my old economics professor would say), but a “necessary public good”? Hardly.
October 5, 2010, 6:53 amRicardo says:
If you are the one standing outside watching your neighbor’s house burn to the ground with the flames inching ever closer to your property while firefighters stand around scratching their behinds, you might begin to feel differently. I suspect you would want the firefighters to start fighting the fire before it even gets a chance to spread to your property (so would your insurance company). Am I wrong about that? Keep in mind you don’t know how many propane tanks your hypothetical neighbor keeps in his garage.
And if you live in a big city or a wildfire-prone area like parts of California or Florida, I’m not even sure it is a sane discussion to begin with. Ben Franklin recognized this almost 280 years ago with respect to Philadelphia.
October 5, 2010, 8:10 amBlue Neponset says:
The point I was making is that a fire left to burn is dangerous to people who are not the property owner. My apologies if I wasn’t being clear enough for you.
October 5, 2010, 8:39 ambuddyglass says:
I was assuming the insurance companies might take care of that, since they want the fire department to respond when the home of someone they’ve insured catches fire. Fire department gets there and puts it out = less damage = less payout, so there’s incentive. This also obviates the need for an administrator whose job it would be to collect this information. The fire department would still need to maintain a list and check it, yes. To respond to the person who asked why the insurance company would be obligated to pay the fire department: the fire department would publish a policy that stipulates it only responds to fires at the homes of those who payed the $75 or who have a homeowner’s insurance policy that explicitly covers payments to fire departments for services rendered.
The other thing the fire department could do, which would be much simpler, is just say “Hey, we’re not serving your town at all unless you give us one bulk payment in exchange for 100% coverage. If you don’t like it then too bad: fund your own fire department.”
The town would then be free to collect this bulk payment in whatever way they wanted. Flat fee per residence, extra percentage on property tax, sales tax, etc.
October 5, 2010, 9:23 ammuffler says:
There are multiple reasons why service like fire control etc. should be a tax based common service. Generally speaking fire does not follow the human rules of land boundaries. A fire which starts (either through stupidity or accident) has the potential to spin out of control if not dealt with quickly. This endangers entire areas, towns and cities way beyond the “who paid and who didn’t”. When you make fire services a market commodity then you make subjective when it really is required for a stable society that is conducive to a healthy economy.
In Rome in the 2nd and 1st century BC there were no civil fire brigades. Fires were dealt with by hired teams if the owner could afford them (which was rare). A man named Crassus became the wealthiest man in all of Rome by showing up to fires and buying the properties on either side of a fire at low cost while the fire burned. He then proceeded to bring in his own fire brigade and put out the fire.
It is easy to develop the idea that a free market fire service would be better then a joint funded service by the local governments. I wonder what will be the loop holes in your contract that allows highest profit for minimum service quality and what services might be “on site” extras. Just a thought for you free market for everything people.
October 5, 2010, 9:31 amrpt says:
We have different conceptions of justice, I suppose.
October 5, 2010, 9:31 amGerbeel Haamster says:
I don’t get it. They were already there.
If I see a man’s house burning, I don’t care if he’s the biggest A-hole in the world, I try to save it…
Geesh.
Bill him later.
Some things you don’t do just to make a point.
October 5, 2010, 9:36 amJKB says:
This is a blawg so enlighten us in how you would collect on this bill of yours? Would it be actual costs, costs plus, a penalty amount? Even with the presumed homeowner making a verbal offer, there is enough confusion to cause any monies you’d collect to end up in the hands of the lawyers instead of the fire department. And that doesn’t even address the fire department insurance issue in which it may deny coverage to any equipment or personnel injured at a non-subscriber’s fire. And what of disputes over incidental damage caused in fighting the fire? And who is going to take on paying the salary of the firefighters who violated policy, illegally contracted and misused city resources when they are fired and sued?
This is clearly not something that can be contracted in the duress of an ongoing fire in the home.
BTW, the homeowner may have other problems. My homeowner’s policy on a TN property requires that I maintain the subscription to the VFD. So he may have problems collecting.
Not sure about Obion county but it is definitely not burning season yet, (my county requires a burn permit from Nov-April, all non-food fires banned the rest of the year) and the last week or so has definitely not been burning weather. (windy with just enough rain to take the edge off the drought)
October 5, 2010, 10:05 amRicardo says:
I’d be curious about this. It would be truly perverse if Obion county had strict fire codes and regulations on what you can and cannot burn on your property but then makes fire protection purely optional. The rationale for both is almost exactly the same: a fire that starts on your property is not necessarily likely to stay there.
October 5, 2010, 10:43 amLucia says:
Sure. I’d ask the firefighter to come and hose down my lawn and roof. I might even turn on a hose and start hosing down my own lawn and roof.
October 5, 2010, 10:46 amMS says:
Googling I found:
This has been an ongoing problem in this county for years. It may not be the first house to burn down.( 2008 house fire?)
The cities in question are mostly volunteer, underfunded, using cast off equipment, have shortages of equipment, begging for what little they get, including fire engines and tankers.
South Fulton for example only has 2 engines and one small water tanker. They have old cast off equipment and only 19 firemen (what portion are volunteer I’m unsure of, but the Chief started as a Volunteer. The city cannot pay for all the firefighters they need currently.
These cities had performed this service for free in the past, until finally there was a meeting with the county and residents informing them they could no longer continue to provide fire support for free. The reasons stated was the extensive use of their services, as 80% of the calls they were receiving came from the nonpaying county residents. They were overworking the firefighters with an obscene amount of man hours They could not continue doing this for free. These volunteers were on call 24/7 365 using their own personal vehicles needed to respond. I forget the exact figure but it’s more than likely this was becoming a full time job for many of the volunteer fire fighters.
Funding is also a real tangible thing in this issue . There was only 40k to 50k budgets per year per City, and 12k a year for the county operating budgets. You have to fund not only equipment but a building w/supporting utilities a 911 system w/operators , insurance, etc.
The cities have tried several options to fill the gap until a county fire department could be started:
A $500 fee per call and County residents didn’t pay 50% of the time. Yes the city could sue for the amount but this of course would add to cost w/ legal fees and more time by the fire dept per case.
Each of the helping cities agreed to give 10k apiece to the county to start it’s own fire service. They suggested grants and funding from Federally available resources. While small it is an incentive to start.
The County voted to have, but could not fund a fire department:
The explored a charge per electric meter to each residence to funding (didn’t happen), an option of about $45 each a year added to their property taxes (fell through).
Finally the $75 dollar fee for service a year was decided on until the county would get it’s act together and start it’s own fire dept.
I wonder will the Cities still provide the opt-in service after this. If given the choice of dropping it previously, one fire chief responded “Immediately” . The possibility the county can put themselves out of any fire protection at all is a real one.
How long before the City of South Fulton sufferers a catastrophe While it’s department is off fighting fires in the county and cannot respond to it’s own city residents’ needs. At that point the city has to call out fire protection from another city and so forth. Response times are going to continue to be extended. Eventually this is all going to have a real cost in human lives if it hasn’t already.
There are a lot of heated arguments about this on either side. The way I see it is perhaps with the loss of the home, the Fire Chief could be trying to force the residents of Olbion County to take some responsibility for their own protection. He has to also live up to his own responsibility of protecting his own responders and city. He can’t do both under the current circumstances. He has very few resources at his disposal. Frankly I’m amazed they have kept it up as long as they have.
The only thing they could have possibly done differently is respond to watch over the neighbors property just in case . Yet how often would they be calling volunteers for just-in-case and how many hours would those firemen be spending a year doing that? It could run the risk of crying wolf and scuttle response times.
I’m afraid if this house fire doesn’t wake Olbion County up nothing will. They can’t continually force the cities to do this until they break their human resources and people start dying from lack of such resources. They also can’t continue to force good people to do this for free or nearly nothing.
People will volunteer for a good cause but this seems to have come to a head where people think to protect property one must abuse the fire fighters with total lack of support or responsibility and when that goes wrong to blame the firefighters solely for the terrible outcome. The City had no obligation to begin with but it offered to help for a fee. One regretfully that was not paid. It seems like such a pittance now compared to the loss of a home. Yet how many years have homeowners gone without supporting the department yet having used or needed their services until this day ? It’s bad PR to say you don’t pay so let it burn down. But common sense says if they start responding for free others will stop paying and the deparment can’t continue to be both City and County support. This fire may save lives down the road, who knows. When given the choice between letting the house burn or saving a life the house wouldn’t seem like such a big price to pay. Look at it from a fire fighters perspective it might seem different . They have to know at this point they are risking lives by stretching themselves so thin. I have no idea what shape morale was in before this, but it can’t be much improved now.
tl:dr version
October 5, 2010, 11:15 amIf my house burned down while the firemen watched I’d be irate: Unless I had been given so many opportunities to fund my own fire protection, and didn’t think it was worth it until my house burned down. Then to save it I’d pledge to spend every penny I had whether I could afford it or not. ( The fire dept tried that and half the people still wouldn’t pay for them after responding) This is a sad hard lesson for all involved.
Ricardo says:
You do realize that blasting a fire hose at your house can result in pretty extensive water damage, don’t you? That’s why you want the fire contained on your neighbor’s property before it even has a chance to jump onto your property.
Otherwise, in a relatively good scenario, you can look forward to replacing many of your valuables damaged by water and spending a couple days or weeks living in a motel while you have someone come in and rip out the dry wall to prevent mold from building up.
October 5, 2010, 11:16 amGerbeel Haamster says:
This is all bullcrap. They were already on site.
Try and save the guy’s home. Just like you automatically try to save the accident victim’s life.
Do you just not get it?
Like John Prine said, “Some humans ain’t human.”
October 5, 2010, 11:20 amRicardo says:
What if one of the fire fighters get injured while fighting the fire and the department’s insurance company refuses to pay out because it was not an authorized call? Who’s going to pay for his medical treatment, physical therapy, lost wages, etc.? The guy who just had his most valuable asset almost burned to the ground? The taxpayers of the neighboring city? That’s not bullcrap. That’s the Real World(tm).
I can’t see a good reason to blame the fire department for this, especially in light of helpful information MS provided about the history of this situation. The fire department is not under any obligation to provide services outside the city limits to begin with.
October 5, 2010, 11:33 amMikey says:
Wouldn’t that depend on the specifics of the area served?
The requirements are very different for urban and rural areas. In an urban area, generally under the jurisdiction of a single local government or adjoining governments which have grown in close cooperation, and where fires will spread rapidly between living units in a single building and between buildings, it is both desirable and viable to fund fire protection via taxation. However, in a rural area where fires are far less likely to spread between buildings, governments do not overlap as they do in urban areas, and the tax structure is not set up to reach everyone in the area that needs protection, a subscription-based model might be the only viable option.
In the particular instance we’re discussing, the residents of the rural area do not fall under the taxation authority of the city that has the fire department, so funding via taxation is simply not an option. The fire department had tried a fee-for-call model, but was unable to collect half the time because there was no legal authority to compel collection. So, they chose the only alternative that enabled them to cover the costs of providing service. The individual whose house was allowed to burn knew well in advance what the specific rules were, and what he needed to do to ensure coverage, and he decided to forgo payment and assume he would be able to free-ride.
October 5, 2010, 11:34 amDavid Schwartz says:
For how long do you think that would work? For how long do you think the taxpayers of one county will continue to pay for the freeloaders in a different county?
October 5, 2010, 11:34 amGerbeel Haamster says:
Swartz and Ricardo,
You guys give libertarians a bad name.
You probably set there in your little Dilbert-cubes and talk and talk and never do anything.
The idea that you could be on-site watching a man’s home burn and do nothing is kinda sick, doncha know?
That’s my point. Put yourself out of your cubicle and think about being on-site at the fire, with the ability and equipment to make a difference.
Get it?
You’re trying to make policy, and relating to this specific happening, I’m saving the guy’s house and figuring things out later — the way a human being would do it…
I’d try and save your house, because no matter what an a-hole you’ve proven yourself to be — chances are that maybe your wife and kids aren’t a-holes, and they deserve the effort even if you don’t…
October 5, 2010, 11:52 amTed says:
I agree. The highest “good” in this case is to protect important property, like a person’s house. The second highest “good” is paying for it. Flip them around and you undermine the reasons for doing the “good” in the first place.
No, you step aside. Me and Crannick, we know our rights.
No it’s not. See here:
Gotta break a few eggs, right?
Hang on, let me wipe my eyes. What was I going to say? Oh, I don’t think anyone anywhere thinks “all dangers and risk everywhere [should] be ameliorated by coercive governments funded by taxation.” Rather, I think most sane people everywhere agree that certain risks should be ameliorated through government action funded by taxation. Or, perhaps you would like to cut the defense budget entirely and leave it up to the private militias to protect our (short lived) sovereignty? See? I can be hyperbolic too!
Yeah, that way we can maximize the most base, animalistic human instincts: fear, greed, revenge. You know. All those instincts that totally minimize suffering in the world. Heck, maybe we can become so advanced and free that we can do away with society and civilization all together!
Evidently, you’re not a libertarian “blessed by Liberty.” You’re merely blessed with a moral conscience and sense of social responsibility. But I have to ask, what if the owner of the house was not only an asshole, but owed you $75? Does that change your mind?
That didn’t work here. They came and the neighbor’s property was still burned. And, umm, hosing down your lawn might sound nice and simple, but it might now be so simple if there is a full-on structure fire raging next door. Have you ever seen how effective a garden hose is at putting out a fire?
October 5, 2010, 12:08 pmGallileo says:
Gerbeel Hamster:
It’s so generous of you to offer to fund the free-riders yourself! Wow. Have you contacted the fire department with your offer?
Be sure to let them know that you are going to pay for the next free-rider whose house catches fire. I’m sure you have the resources and wherewithal to cover.
A truly noble–nay, truly human–thing to do.
October 5, 2010, 12:10 pmBlue Neponset says:
Funding via taxation was an option. Obion County could have taxed Mr. Cranick $75 and then paid the City of Fulton for Mr. Cranick’s fire response services.
Obion County didn’t want to do that because….I don’t know.
October 5, 2010, 12:13 pmLooking In says:
buddyglass, are you lazy, forgetful, or obtuse? It would really help if people would actually read the stories about this situation before posting comments. This case is about a town FD’s arrangements for providing service to people who do not live in that town, or in any other town.
If the town in Tennessee followed this model for non-town residents, then the policy would be all-or-nothing coverage outside of its borders, which would effectively give a single person veto power over every other resident who wanted coverage and was willing to pay for it.
If I lived in the area (meaning, outside of the town but eligible to buy coverage for $75 a year), my response would be, “Let people who don’t want coverage not pay for it, but if they don’t pay then don’t give them what they didn’t pay for.”
October 5, 2010, 12:16 pmtms says:
An important player that we might be overlooking is insurance company that was insuring the man’s home. Apparently, they are on the hook for the loss.
My guess is that the insurance companies are now going to change their contracts to include a requirement that their policy holders pay for the fire-fighting service. It would work similarly to the way a mortgage contract works, where the lender requires the borrower to maintain a homeowners insurance policy. They could even set up an escrow account on behalf of the homeowner to make sure the fee is paid.
No, it’s not a government mandate, but the marketplace will work this out in about a second, assuming the state insurance board approves the change.
October 5, 2010, 12:26 pmGerbeel Haamster says:
Thanks, I guess. And no, it wouldn’t. I might yell at him while I’m trying to save his house, “Where’s my fn money”.
Don’t get it do you. When did I offer to send you any money, free-rider? All I did was say I’d try to keep your house from burning while you were whining about the political and philisophical and economic implications of me helping your family.
October 5, 2010, 12:30 pmMikey says:
My understanding is that option was raised and voted down by the residents of Obion County.
However, I only saw that stated in one place, so I’m not 100% sure about it. If it’s accurate, I’m with you–I don’t know why they’d vote it down.
In any case, the situation today is that the city doesn’t have authority to tax the residents of the county, so the subscription-based model was the remaining viable option.
October 5, 2010, 12:34 pmAnthony says:
Because a sufficiently large fraction of the voters of Obion County, like Mr Freeloader, did not wish to pay an additional parcel tax.
October 5, 2010, 12:37 pmToby says:
I’m thinking this is an un-told part of the story. My Kentucky-born neighbor Interesting but not dispositive parallel) is far too cheap to either pay to have his trash taken away (going price, $14 / month) or to pay the fees to take it to the dump. He instead burns it in the side yard.
Of course, he burns it at night, in the summer, when it is hot. I like to sleep with my windows open, do not need AC even in summer if there is a breeze. But when he burns, I have to close the windows, and house remains oppressively hot at night. He never heard of a burn-free season, and kept this schedule through the recent drought in the SE.
At times, when he has burned for night after night (is he getting trash from his distant relatives?) I uncharitably muse, while lying in the dark, how nice it would be if he caught his house on fire. But then, black thoughts come easier when you are awake, in the dark, in the heat.
So what’s the story on the trash?
October 5, 2010, 12:53 pmGallileo says:
Mr Gerbeel,
You yourself, Mr Gerbeel, right this very minute, can prevent this from ever happening again. All you have to do is either pay $75 per unsubscribed house or the total costs of fighting the next fire at a free-rider’s house. Why should you wait until exigent circumstances make the situation that much worse?
It’s the decent thing to do, after all, and really the least amount you could do. These volunteer firefighters are taking off work–dropping everything at a moments’ notice to go save someone’s house.
You don’t have to do anything hastily. Just write a check and the problem is solved. The citizens of the county have decided it isn’t worth it multiple times. The free rider here has decided it isn’t worth it. Half of the people who were under the “we’ll work it out later” solution decided that getting their house saved wasn’t even worth $500.
But you have decided it is worth it. Great. Put your money where your mouth is or shut up.
October 5, 2010, 12:55 pmLooking In says:
Having worked up close and personal with insurance companies, I say this: Never, ever underestimate an insurance company’s ability to be so stupid that you wonder how any of them remember to breathe. Yeah, they ought to require homeowners to obtain fire fighting service at their expense if it’s not included in their taxes, but don’t count on them doing that.
October 5, 2010, 1:11 pmJeff says:
Some news reports said that Cranick “forgot” to pay the fee.
October 5, 2010, 1:24 pmIt was stupid and irresponsible of him to fail to protect his house against fire by paying the fee, but it was horrendous that the Fulton fire dept. did not fight the fire and get their $75 later. It would have been a learning experience for Mr. Cranick causing him to make sure he paid the fee next time. Tennessee is full of “good christian” folk, and if this is the way those good christians act toward a neighbor in dire need of help, they can all burn. They acted spitefully, irresponsibly, and with mean spirit. They should all be charged as passive felons who purposefully allowed fellow human beings to remain in a dangerous, perilous situation that they could have helped to mitigate. Regargless of whether Mr. Cranick paid the lousy $75 on time , or not, the Fulton FD exacted an undeserved punishment on him that did not fit his crime. It was like a punishment the god of the old testament would have exacted on some one who would not kiss his behind. What happened to christian charity, love thy neighbor, forgiveness, and just plain human empathy? To stand by and watch when you have all the tools to help should be a crime. The S. Fulton fire dept. made an atrocious decision out of pettiness and irresponsiblity….they thought they could play god and punish this man.. They were acting like much lower creatures with no consciences, and those sociopaths should be ashamed of themselves.
Looking In says:
I don’t believe he “forgot” to pay. The town has a policy of calling people who decline to pay to verify that they really don’t want the coverage. The mayor was quoted saying that they had called him. He’s quoted saying that one of his sons had a fire a few years ago and the town fought the fire and then came after him for the subscription money later on.
Maybe the town recognized a pattern, and decided that the Crannick family was only going to get one break.
October 5, 2010, 1:30 pmepeeist says:
Fires spread and are dangerous to others. Even for a libertarian, I don’t see a problem with making the fee a mandatory tax (or alternatively, providing that firefighting will be provided to all BUT if no $75 fee paid, a much higher cost recovery fee will be charged…). Yes, I know firefighters started historically as private services, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best model.
To avoid the free rider problem, I think imposing a fee/tax on all makes sense OR charging the full amount to those without a contract and suing if they refuse to pay. Ignoring the fire until it spread to the insured neighbor was stupid and irresponsible.
In the context of private firefighting to protect e.g. homes from forest fires, my recollection is that even there, though generally unobjectionable, in some cases the private firefighting may act to steer the fire in a particular undesirable direction, causing more damage to third parties…(that’s from memory, I might be mistaken as to specifics).
Again, back to this situation, if I had paid the $75 dollar fee and my neighbour hadn’t, but my neighbour had an uncontrolled fire, I would want it put out BEFORE it spread to my property.
October 5, 2010, 1:32 pmGallileo says:
Jeff,
Are you offering to pay for the next free rider whose house is burning down?
There *will* be one. The only thing we don’t know is exactly who and exactly when. Why should you wait until there are very few options on what to do to solve the problem? Just write a check and fix it. You might not know who, and you might not know when, but as sure as night follows day, the situation will come up again.
But you can prevent it! Go for it. Just solve it right now! Right this minute! It’s only a lousy $75 away. Right? You can fix it! Not doing so would be so unchristian.
You know it will happen and yet you don’t take steps to fix it. How spiteful!
October 5, 2010, 1:34 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Would you accept, in lieu of such a fee, an arrangement where the individual homeowner purchases insurance or posts a bond against all such damage to neighboring property that arises from a fire that started on his property provided such damage would have been prevented if the homeowner had provided for fire protection services?
It seems to me the cost of such insurance would be quite a bit cheaper than $75/yr.
October 5, 2010, 1:51 pmLooking In says:
The people in that county are idiots. If they’d just tax themselves to form a county fire department, the tax would come right back to them through lower homeowners insurance premiums. But they’re southerners, never too good at math.
I saw Crannick interviewed by Keith Olbermann, who threw him a series of softball questions. One thing was evident, and that’s that this isn’t a remote rural county. It’s more like a far suburb, evidently dominated by stupid cheapskates.
October 5, 2010, 2:09 pmBlue Neponset says:
How much does the neighbor get if his daughter dies in the fire?
October 5, 2010, 2:10 pmLucia says:
Sure. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s the duty of the city of Fulton to donate their time and resources to people in an unincorporated area who refuse to pay taxes to support their own services. If I chose to live in the unincorporated area, I’d know that was one of the risks I carried. (I have lived in unincorporated areas btw.)
Of course a hose is useless against an already raging fire. That’s why if you want to do something like this, you have to start watering before the sparks land on your roof or lawn. Of course even that might not work if the entire lot next to you is in flames.
But none of these are reasons to not get everything as wet as possible when you see the neighbors house on fire but before the fire has moved toward your home. Nor are they reasons to not request the fire department be on stand by to hose things down if he fire jumps or even dampen the ground near the lot lines before the fire jumps. Then they can do it or not. If a fire was raging, I’d ask.
If your point is the neighbor’s fire endangers my property: Yes. So, would I be angry at my neighbor for not paying the $75 bucks? Yes. Would I support getting the county to levy taxes to avoid this situation– Yes. I said so before.
But I don’t see how it’s the obligation of tax payers in a neighboring city that does not tax me or my neighbor to donate services to people in my jurisdiction just because the voters in my jurisdiction won’t get their act together and solve this problem. When I’ve bought property, I’ve made sure I know just how things like fire service stand so I know.
October 5, 2010, 2:21 pmJohn A. Fleming says:
I’m amazed this story has the internet legs that it does. It’s over all the blogs, and people are commenting like crazy. But this story happens all the time, all over the U.S western States. It’s a fact of life, not a libertarian hell.
In southern California (not a libertarian stronghold!), during wildfire season, you can contract with a private fire company, who will save your house while your neighbors’ burn. The public fire agencies, the Sheriff and Fire Marshal, evacuate the area, but let the private fire companies through. The Fire Marshal mandates and enforces brush clearance at the residence-wildlands boundary, but sometimes the fire’s too hot, too big, and jumps the boundary. The private companies will let your neighbors house burn, and save yours. Their resources are not infinite.
Here’s the difference. The private companies protect your house. The public fire agencies work to contain the fire, so it doesn’t spread. They try to minimize property destruction and maximize public safety when fire happens, but they are not obligated to save your house. If your house has to burn to save others, then let it burn. Public agencies practice fire triage.
Another example, the fires last month above Boulder, CO. Same deal, another non-libertarian stronghold. In the mountains they have VFD’s, they have private fire companies. The Fire Marshal evacuates all the residents, by force and the Sheriff if you refuse to go. If you don’t have a VFD or private fire company protecting your house, you are at the mercy of the wind, the fire, and the availability of public resources. All you can do is pray. Always some people lose their house.
You live in the mountains, or at the wildlands boundary, you accept this risk. Nobody forces you to buy there, and nobody forces you to buy additional fire protection. You wanna depend on the public agencies for fire protection, you are at the mercy of all your idiot neighbors who vote for corrupt politicians who spend public money on all sorts of feel-good crap while starving the Fire Department.
And if you see your neighbor practicing unsafe fire activities, you give him hell. You have to let him know that you’re here, you’re watching, and you disapprove.
October 5, 2010, 2:25 pmepeeist says:
I think the reported situation is very different. It wasn’t an area-wide forest-fire conflagration type situation, it was a fire limited to the neighbour’s house which could be totally put out before it spread (to the neighbour’s or the forest…).
To use your examples, if I have private insurance to protect my own house (only) from fire, and I call to say that my [expletive] neighbour has an uncontrolled fire in his backyard, the best, most cost-effective, lowest-risk, way to protect my property is to put out the fire on my neighbour’s property before it spreads to mine (in this situation, consent to enter was given so no trespassing required even though might arguably be justified by public or private necessity). Yes, my neighbour gets an unpaid-for benefit, just like if I live in a forest and the private service I’ve contracted with decides the best way to fulfill the contract and save my house is to also save my neighbour’s house, because of the situation on the ground and the spread of flames.
October 5, 2010, 3:14 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Same as if he ran her over with a snowmobile or shot her through the face with an errant canister of buckshot.
October 5, 2010, 3:25 pmgeorge says:
Last year I let my supplemental dental insurance lapse. I did a cost/benefits analysis covering the last 10 years, and found that I was paying much more in than I was getting out. Notwithstanding the math, this year I broke a tooth, needed an implant, and wound up $3500 out of pocket.
I believe that the City of Fulton should have covered these expenses for me, don’t you?
October 5, 2010, 3:42 pmkatahdin says:
It strikes me as odd that so many people in this thread seem to think that not having the fire department come to put out a house fire is bizarrely irrational. It seems to me (and others upthread who have done the math on the probability of house fires) that it is an economic decision no different than deciding to forgo collision insurance on your car. It may be wise or not, depending on the value of the car, the likelihood of a crash, and the cost of the protection. The fact that it’s a small cost and large risk doesn’t matter. After all, the small cost and large benefit of a lottery ticket don’t make buying a lottery ticket rational (or in this context, not buying one irrational).
One can try to distinguish fire department response by citing those times when the fire department arrives in time to save someone who would have died in the fire otherwise. While I am no expert, I think those are a very small minority of cases – the window of opportunity is quite small. We had a local fire recently where the first truck that arrived perhaps 3 minutes after the alarm but had a pump failure, and the second truck arrived in another 3 minutes later. That 3 minutes was enough to change things from ‘we might have saved some of them’ to ‘not a chance of entering the house’. I think there are quite a few rural properties where a six minute response is very unlikely. For those people, maybe spending $750 on adding the new residential sprinklers might be a better investment – in the sense of likely to save more lives – than ten years of subscription to a fire service.
Wildland fires and emergency medical services are additional issues, of course, that may or may not affect the calculus, depending on how they are supplied, the local environment, and so on – but it doesn’t seem like an obvious no brainer decision.
Obviously :-).
October 5, 2010, 3:57 pmbuddyglass says:
Fundamental difference here. You’re in no danger of dying due to your broken tooth. If there are people dying inside a burning house and a fire department declines to rescue them because they didn’t pay $75 up front…yeah, I can’t support that. Especially considering the persons in danger may not have been the same ones who decided to not pay for coverage.
October 5, 2010, 4:22 pmMikey says:
The guy whose house burned down in this case made exactly the kind of economic judgment you’re talking about, except for one factor: his assumption he’d be allowed to free-ride. He used that as part of his economic judgment.
Essentially, he thought he could use other peoples’ money to gamble with. Unfortunately for him, he was wrong, and when he lost the bet, he lost the house.
October 5, 2010, 4:24 pmLooking In says:
Cranick is an irresponsible idiot, and I don’t believe his story about “forgetting” the fee. He knew the score, that he had to pay the fee to have fire protection. Here he is, with a wife and a child. What kind of man doesn’t protect his family? And let’s recall how the fire started: Cranick let his 8-year-old son burn garbage near the house without supervision. Quite a family man, huh?
October 5, 2010, 4:40 pmErik says:
There are some interesting aspects to these questions. Let’s say that the department offers to put the fire out for $X. The homeowner, probably regardless of the size of X, will agree. How much can the fire department really get?
One would think that, in this circumstance, that quantum meruit is safe. But what about the value of the property saved? Or $75 divided by the probability of fire? Certainly there are values of X that no court would enforce.
I would think that the fastest and most efficient way to protect the house next door would have been to put the fire out. After all, the fire department should have an interest in becoming available in case a fire were to appear somewhere else.
So this is about the fire department making a point. I question the wisdom of the fire department’s decision — not coming out at the initial 911 calls imposed a price, and accepting the offer to pay the costs of the firefighting imposes another cost that people would want to avoid. Probably enough encouragement to people to pay the $75 without watching it burn down.
October 5, 2010, 4:54 pmTed says:
This doesn’t strike you as horribly inadequate? So much so, that prevention might be a better option than compensation after-the-fact?
October 5, 2010, 4:57 pmgeorge says:
Buddyglass: “Fundamental difference here. You’re in no danger of dying due to your broken tooth. If there are people dying inside a burning house and a fire department declines to rescue them because they didn’t pay $75 up front…yeah, I can’t support that. Especially considering the persons in danger may not have been the same ones who decided to not pay for coverage.”
Unwarranted assumption on your part. As it happens, I have a heart defect. I could die of an infection which a cracked tooth could host, or so I have been told by two out of three doctors who don’t smoke Camels. So I invest in a stash of antibiotics which I always have on hand for weekends or when I’m out of town, and Infection Strikes! Kind of like paying $75 for a fire department…
Putting that aside, if anyone dies due to such a fire, it is not the fault of the fire department, or the City of Fulton. If it were to be anyone’s fault, it would be that of the man who decided to save $75.
As for the hypothetical of a fire department standing around while someone dies – which is not the fact in this case – are you suggesting that a volunteer fire department has a duty at law to rescue? I suppose that might be the case under some statue, but I have my doubt about such a duty in common law. But the futherest extent of such a duty would be to rescue the endangered person, not save the house.
October 5, 2010, 5:11 pmPerseus says:
Depending on my assessment of the risks and the cost/benefit ratio, I might. But John Fleming is correct about the significant role that private companies play in providing protection, even in places like California (e.g., see here and here). Notably, however, subscription service doesn’t require the “option known as taxation.”
October 5, 2010, 5:47 pmLucia says:
Most cost-effective to whom? You? Or the company that spends man-power putting out the fire. In many places, the lowest cost for them is to do very little unless the fire does spread.
If you really think the most cost effective way to protect your house from neighbor’s fires is for the private company you contract with to put out the neighbor’s fire, wouldn’t you interview your neighbors and pay the $75 for those who don’t pay? Small cost for you. Sure, your neighbors get a benefit they don’t pay for. And you, who think the insurance is worth it pay it. Meanwhile the company doing the work does precisely what you have contracted for.
October 5, 2010, 6:16 pmLooking In says:
That’s a thought, but instead I might take comfort in the fact that the subscription service includes having the FD come out to a non-subscriber’s fire and making sure it doesn’t spread to my place. I might keep an extra supply of s’mores on hand for the possibility.
October 5, 2010, 6:46 pmClayton says:
The problem with the incremental cost would be that no one would pay the $75, everyone would expect to do one of these contracts when their houses catch on fire. This would mean that 1) They would get charged a lot, and probably couldn’t and wouldn’t pay anyway. and 2) The fire dept could not operate at all unless there were fires since they would have no baseline budget. Who would pay to buy all their equipment and upkeep at startup?
October 5, 2010, 7:07 pmClayton says:
The interesting point for me, a skeptic to libertarian views, is that if the guy had paid, the neighbor would have suffered no damage. Thus, the failure of the original owner to pay his fees indirectly caused damage to the neighbor. Its like with sewer fees, they don’t let some people opt-out and use a septic tank or buckets because it would adversely affect neighbors, thats why those fees are mandatory. This scenario is a perfect example of why they should be mandatory, and more distantly, why health insurance should be mandatory.
October 5, 2010, 7:11 pmPerseus says:
The God of the New Testament is the same as the God of the Old Testament: He is both loving and righteous. Of course, many with a soft disposition like to overlook the hard side of the Christian God.
October 5, 2010, 7:27 pmDouglas2 says:
This is a sad situation but the online response is bizarre.
We now know that the town-tax-supported fire services in that county will respond outside their towns if life is in danger, whether a subscription has been paid or not. We know that they respond to brush fires outside their towns in order to contain them, whether a subscription has been paid or not.
So what we have here is a fire where no-one was trapped inside, and it burned for hours whilst appearing to be contained to the Cranick’s property.
The moment it became a field fire and risked spreading, the fire department mobilized to contain it, and did so. The local news reports do a great job implying that this was because the neighbor had paid the fee, without actually stating so.
According to some reports, when they arrived to attend to the grass/stubble fire the Cranick house was “fully involved”.
So while it is true that the fire department “watched it burn”, what else could they have done at that point to change the outcome? Dumping all of their water on it would not have made it any less of a total loss, and it would have meant that any other call in the area might have to be dealt with by “mutual aid” from another distant fire company, even if danger to life was involved. It is a town fire department responding to a rural fire with its only water tanker. Too bad for if there is a larger brush fire in another area without hydrants…
I’ve been trying to understand great moral obligation for the South Fulton fire department to have done something, either responding to the initial out-of-jurisdiction 911 call or after they were on scene. So far I can only come up with the following arguments, and they all seem to be a bit “straw man”-ish:
A) If the residents of one jurisdiction have the foresight to vote taxes on themselves to support a fire service, but the residents of an adjacent one do not, then the citizens of the responsible town are morally obligated to provide and pay for fire calls to the neighbors who don’t pay, even when it is only structures and contents at risk. (http://www.kansascity.com/2010/10/05/2279115/fire-fighters-condemn-south-fultons.html)
B) Fire service is a basic human right and if the citizens won’t vote to tax themselves to support it then a higher level of government should require them to.
C) Because the firefighters showed up, they should have taken actions that wouldn’t have changed the outcome and which might have put themselves and others in greater danger.
October 5, 2010, 7:52 pm1040 says:
Torts.
October 5, 2010, 7:56 pmAnthony says:
Something of a stretch. While I’m not actually opposed to the health insurance law, the directly comparable case is vaccination, not coverage of non-contagious illnesses.
October 5, 2010, 8:38 pmbuddyglass says:
Without commenting on the law (since I’m not sure what it is in this case) I’d say that if a firefighting crew is present at a fire in which people need rescuing that they are morally obligated (at least, I would feel so obligated) to act in their capacity as trained rescue workers and save who they could. I consider any such obligation to not extend to protecting property.
Also- I know this wasn’t the case in this particular incident. But you seemed to be implying that if it had been the fire crew would still have been justified in declining to act. That’s what I can’t really agree with.
October 5, 2010, 10:03 pmPaul says:
I wonder if this was the cause of the Great Chicago Fire? Perhaps Mrs. O’Leary refused to pay for fire protection.
October 6, 2010, 12:31 amJoseph Addison says:
You libertarians are a bunch of fucking assholes.
October 6, 2010, 10:02 amImADad says:
The neighbor who had paid should sue the FD for negligence if there was any damage to his property, because their inaction led to the damage.
If I was a prosecutor, I’d be charging the FD with arson.
October 6, 2010, 10:38 amMikey says:
Libertarians everywhere can only wither in the face of your brilliant rhetoric and rock-solid arguments.
October 6, 2010, 10:41 amLucia says:
Why do you think people who think the city of Fulton isn’t obligated to put out fires for non-city residents who don’t pay the fee are liberterians? I’m not a libertarian. If I lived in that county, I would strongly support the county levying a tax to fund a county wide fire department. Failing that, I would support my neighborhood creating a neighborhood association that levied dues and arranged for fire fighting services of some sort. In this particular circumstance, I would arrange for the neighborhood association to collect the $75 from every home owner (sue if they don’t pay) and see to it that every house was covered by the City of Fulton.
What I don’t see is how the city of Fulton has an obligation to put out the Cranick’s fire. I don’t see how they were required to do so for the sake of minimizing fire at the Cranick’s neighbor. For $75, the city of Fulton provided the service of putting out fires that had actually started on subscribers lots. That’s what the arrangement was. A service that put out a subscriber’s fires and that of all neighbors would need to cost more– possibly much more because the number of free riders would likely increase and that cost would have to be passed on to the subscribers. Many subscribers would likely prefer to pay $75, and assume the increased risk that a small amount of their lawn would catch fire (as happened in this case) before the town of Fulton would act.
And to repeat: I am not a libertarian. I am a fiscal conservative who thinks the Town of Fulton should not burden their tax payers with the cost of providing non-city residents who won’t pay for fire services with free fire services.
October 6, 2010, 11:08 amPeter says:
So, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, whatever,
How about paying directly to the police, firefighters, etc, as we pay for a big mac? Lucy, folks, why should I pay for your protection, with MY MONEY, JUST MINE, MY DEAR MONEY, for instance? You’re total strangerS to me, after all. Gee, this will be funny. Something like Blade Runner ;)
October 6, 2010, 12:34 pmGallileo says:
So Peter,
Most of us would happily vote to tax ourselves to get fire and police service. The people in this county didn’t. So you want the responsible ones to pay for the irresponsible ones? I suppose you supported the bank bailouts too?
I’ll give you the same challenge I gave the other critics–
This situation will inevitably happen again. There is no question. Sitting right here, right now, you have the chance to prevent another problem like this one. All you have to do is post a bond to pay to fight the next fire. Easy peasy. Write a check right now, and the next time this happens everything is hunky dory, no problems.
But if you aren’t willing to write that check, please explain to us why you can live with yourself, valuing the almight dollar over all else.
Write the check man. Write it today. Be the hero.
October 6, 2010, 12:49 pmPeter says:
Well, Galileo, I don’t want you, or your friends, to get my money. I earned it. You forgot to pay the police, you don’t have the money, you don’t get it. Simple as that. I have a bunch of money, and my private militia. Most of us would vote to tax ourselves? What the hell is that? You can´t decide about my money. Go get it yourselves, you commies ;)
October 6, 2010, 1:13 pmLooking In says:
The person to sue is the guy who didn’t pay his fee. He was obligated to either purchase protection or provide an alternative means of keeping his fire from spreading.
October 6, 2010, 1:13 pmLooking In says:
Did you read the coverage of this story? The town FD’s policy is to put out even a non-subscriber’s fire if there’s a person inside the building.
Not a libertarian here. A lifelong Democrat, actually, and a pretty liberal one. I think the voters there are idiots for not approving a county fire district supported by taxes. But Cranick knew the rules, and was to cheap to pay $75. He’s the one at fault, not the town fire department that’s strapped for equipment and people because of inadequate funding.
That comment illustrates the degree to which people commenting on this have been city dwellers wholly ignorant of how fire protection is commonly handled in rural areas of the United States. Subscription and private services are common, and many of them will allow houses to burn if someone hasn’t paid up.
October 6, 2010, 1:15 pmGallileo says:
Strawman much?
I’m happy to help pay for those who can’t afford it through higher taxes for everyone else. Fire and police protection is a public good. I’m also happy to cut the people who forgot to pay some slack.
I’m not happy to pay for someone who *twice* actively declined to contribute to that public good. He declined when the original letter came, and then declined again when they called him. It’s likely–given the outcome of *two* votes on the issue in the county–that he voted against taxing himself to get it. If he isn’t willing to contribute to coverage for everyone, then he shouldn’t be surprised when everyone isn’t willing to bail him out. He was the one who chose to go it alone. Not the fire department. The fire department would have been pleased as punch to have him as a subscriber.
I would even be happy to have a “let’s solve this immediate problem and work it out later” approach to these kinds of emergencies. But that had been tried in this county with a $500 fee but the fire department had been unable to collect in roughly half the cases. They had been through this situation before and had realized that the promised made of desperation were essentially worthless. So the FD had found that the “work it out later” approach has created greater problems for the community than it solved.
*He* chose to go it alone. And the FD is morally culpable for not helping him? Give me a break.
But, once again, you can help the next person who has chosen to go it alone. Write the check now and save them. If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to stop condemming everyone else who is too.
October 6, 2010, 1:30 pmTed says:
Why did the FD show up at all then? The fire clearly started on a non-subscriber lot, right? Maybe you want to further clarify what the agreement actually was?
October 6, 2010, 2:23 pmGallileo says:
Ted,
The fire department didn’t show up until the fire threatened a neighbour. They had originally declined to come out when it was just with the free-rider’s house.
October 6, 2010, 2:36 pmTed says:
Which turned out to be a bad decision. The subscriber’s property was burned and sustained (minor) damage. The fire department was paid to prevent this. It’s not exactly unforeseeable that a fire on property A would move to property B. I’m not highlighting the FD’s failure to respond to the non-subscriber’s fire, I’m highlighting that the FD failed to properly respond to a fire that threatened a subscriber’s property.
October 6, 2010, 2:46 pmGallileo says:
I’m sure if the neighbor is disappointed with the services rendered, he will take it up with the FD. I won’t speculate what his opinion is of the service rendered.
But, for the sake of argument here, assume he is satisfied with what he got for his $75. If he is satisfied with the services rendered, I doubt that fact would change the opinion of those who think the FD should have put out the fire on the free-rider’s property.
If it does, great. If not, then this is just a smoke-screen.
October 6, 2010, 3:18 pmLucia says:
Why are you asking me that? I said I favored the public paying for police and firefighters. What I’m against is this:
Community A refuses to levy taxes to have a police department, fire service, library, schools or whatever other public service might be nice. So, they don’t pay taxes.
Town B does levy taxes and has them all. The reason they won’t pay is… they don’t want to pay.
Then, non-tax paying Community A decrees that taxpayers in Town B must provide Community A with police and fire protection, library cards, schools, water systems or whatever. Town B has to do this whenever someone in Community A thinks they’d like a service, because, after all, free services from Town B provided to non-tax payiers Community A is some sort of right, right?
In my view, Town B doesn’t have to provide Community A services just because Community A is too cheap to pay for them.
If Community A doesn’t want community to pay taxes and doesn’t want community services, then Community A won’t have them. They can’t just look around and decree that they have a right to bleed town B dry to support their tax free lifestyle.
And since everyone seems to think I take this position because I live in a community that doesn’t pay taxes: that’s wrong. I already said I’d rather live in a town where we pay taxes to support the library, fire department, police schools etc. In fact, I do live in such a town and pay taxes to support these services, and vote to maintain this.
Ted says:
If you read any of the articles, it’s clear the fire absolutely did not start on a neighbor’s field. It started on Cranick’s — not a subscribers– farm. It appears to have started after Cranick’s grandson began burning trash in the back yard. That fire went out of control and traveled to Cranick’s house.
I think one of the video’s says the grandson was 8 years old and the fire took 2 hours from location of the burning barrels to the house. One of the news stories quotes the grandmother saying
“My grandson had already called there and he thought that when I got here I could get something done, I couldn’t,” Paulette Cranick.”
This suggests an unsupervised child was burning trash in barrels in the backyard. Unfortunately, some of these details are in videos, which aren’t easy to google for content. So, I may have the child’s age and time for the fire to travel from the barrels to the house wrong. However, it does seem possible the fire started because garbage burning was either not supervised at all, or being managed by an unsupervised grade-school age child who didn’t really know what to do when something went wrong.
My understanding is neighbors house never caught fire — that’s discussed in the link Orin gave at the top of this blog post. So, it’s worth reading. The report I liked says “t was only when a neighbor’s field caught fire, a neighbor who had paid the county fire service fee, that the department responded. Gene Cranick asked the fire chief to make an exception and save his home, the chief wouldn’t.”
However, in some video interviews Cranick says the fire department sprayed the property lines, which suggests the fire department may have been controlling fire just outside a subscriber’s (neighbors) field.
So, the fire department came to put out fire either in, or adjacent to a subscribers field.
To gauge the amount of danger to the neighbors house, you can see the general layout of the area by entering Gene Cranick Farm, South Fulton, TN at googlemaps. http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl Click to the satellite, zoon in and you’ll see there is a fairly long distance of open area between houses. So, fires don’t easily jump house to house in this rural area well outside the city of South Fulton.
October 6, 2010, 3:26 pmPeter says:
Gallileo,
I’m not condemning the FD; they’d be fired, probably, if they acted differently (well, I do have some thoughts about firefighters or police officers, or doctors, acting like that, but nevermind). Now, what do we learn from the fact that the events lead to damages in the neighborhood? Libertarians, or fiscal conservatives, better live in a cocoon. Right? You may have neighbors who don’t pay the price.
October 6, 2010, 3:48 pmTed says:
What does your response have to do with what I wrote? I know the reported facts. I was merely suggesting that you did not understand what the FD’s agreement was. Was it to protect subscribers’ property from fire? Yes. Is there any indication that such agreement was subject to exclusions of fires started on non-subscriber’s property? No. And that’s where you went wrong.
You wrote:
Maybe you know more than I do about the FD’s obligations under the contract, but nothing you wrote suggests that. Nothing in anything I’ve read or seen suggests that the FD was not obligated to protect Crannick’s neighbor’s property, even if the fire started on Crannick’s property.
If the FD failed to protect the neighbor’s field from damage because it refused to provide services to Crannick, it failed to fulfill it’s obligation to the neighbor. That’s all I’m saying. If the agreement contained exclusions for fields, or for fires started on other properties, fine; different facts, different result. But there is no evidence of that here. As it stands, I would advise the neighbor’s to seek legal advice regarding a breach of contract suit against the FD.
It does for me. The majority of the problem (for me) in this case is the damage to the neighbor’s property and how it came about.
October 6, 2010, 3:50 pmGallileo says:
Peter,
The firefighters couldn’t be fired–they are volunteers, already taking time out of their schedule. The mere fact that the free-rider had the opportunity to contract for fire-protection is already out of their generosity. They are already donating their time, and this guy wasn’t willing to pay $75 so that they could have adequate equipment.
And as I said before, I totally am for taxing myself and the general public for public goods. I’m not in favor of letting people who are perfectly able to pay decline to pay and them come crying when that bites them in the ass.
But if you are, put your money where your mouth is and post a bond to protect the next guy that free rides on South Fulton’s taxes.
October 6, 2010, 4:33 pmLucia says:
Well, that’s easy enough to answer. You asked this:
I answered that question which you wrote. (You would have known the answer if you’d read the reports. But, how was i to know you asked a question you already knew the answer to? In any case, that’s one way my answer relates to what you wrote.)
You also asked this.
Which I answered. (Once again, you would have known the answer if you’d read the reports. But, how was i to know you not only asked a question you already knew the answer to but worded the question to suggest you misunderstood the facts? In any case, you asked; I answered. That’s another way my answer relates to what you wrote.)
It appears to be to put out fires on subscribers property. You seem to make some guesses below and make quite a few conclusoin based on your guesses about what it actually was. So, maybe you can clarify by providing links to the agreement so we can all read it?
Ok. So why did you ask three questions with two specifically asking about about reported facts?
Given what you write later, it seems you also do not understand what it is, but are willing to make all sorts of conclusions based on your assumption “fire protection” means something like “guaranteeing the property will never even be at risk of catching on fire”. Or something. But that’s a pretty unusual sort of guarantee.
Do you have any reason to believe “fire protection” means anything other than “putting out uncontrolled fires on a subscribers property”? That’s a pretty common usage of the term. Similarly, farmer’s insurance offerred the Cranick’s “fire protection”. These merely means they paid in the event of a loss due to a fire. Farmer’s didn’t oblige themselves to put out fires.
Is there any indication that the FD didn’t protect the subscribers property? No. The FD protected the field by putting the fire out.
Me neither. The FD did protect Carnick’s neighbors property — they put out the fire on a subscribers property even though that fire started on Carnick’s property.
Had the neighbor decided to burn his own garbage in a controlled manner, the fire department probably would not have come out and “protected” him by putting that fire out– even though sparks from his own controlled fire might, hypothetically, jump out of his own barrels and start a fire on his property.
Sure. “If”. I don’t see how they failed to protect.
Let’s speculate some more. Supposed the subscriber had decided to burn garbage in his own yard. A third busy-body neighbor who knew how fires started at other farms saw this, called the fire departement and explained that sparks might jump out of the barrels and catch the ground on fire. That fire could spread to the house or field and cause damage to the subscribers field, just as it had at the Cranicks.
True “protection” would require the FD to come out and extinguish that fire, right?
Now, suppose the FD refuses on the basis that this is ridiculous.Then fire spread (as it did at the Cranicks). Using your speculation about the definition about the meaning of “fire protection”, would the FD who refused to extinguish the fire in the barrels failed in their obligation to “protect”?
Returning to the actual case involving the fire Cranick started: Do you have any reason to believe the agreed on level protection was any more than putting out fires already raging on the property? If so, do you have a link to the agreement so we can see whether your interpretation is based on anything other than your speculation that the FD must have breached? (Are there any news reports suggesting FD might have violated their contract? Has the neighbor complained? What happened during all those past incidents where the FD let people’s houses burn down?)
Sure. I have no problem with that. Maybe you can even phone him, ask him to show you the agreement and make a deal for him. :)
October 6, 2010, 5:41 pmOwen H. says:
Ted- The fire department’s obligation to the subscriber began when he called them. Were they supposed to be out there before his property was involved? And while they waited, what happens if there is a nother call?
October 6, 2010, 6:26 pmbuddyglass says:
I realize that’s their policy. I was answering the question based on your hypothetical situation proposed here:
In answer to your question, “Are you suggesting that a volunteer fire department has a duty at law to rescue?” I responded with:
You then responded to this by pointing out that in this particular case there was nobody in the house, and the fire department’s policy did in fact obligate them to respond if lives were in danger due to a fire in the home of a non-subscriber. While that may be true, what I thought we were discussing is the hypothetical you had proposed.
October 6, 2010, 7:01 pmTed says:
I love contract interpretation issues, even more so when they’re imaginary! But let’s recall that you said what the contract terms were, not me.
For the record, I don’t know what the contract terms were between the neighbors and the FD. I took issue with your statement that a fire “actually start” on a subsciber’s lot. My argument that the FD should have come and addressed Crannick’s fire to the extent required to protect the neighbor’s property is not relevant to that that issue.
Now you seem to have changed your understanding of the agreement. You seem to acknowledge that you didn’t really mean that a fire has to “actually start” on a subscriber’s property; rather, you meant it must be burning on the subscriber’s property before the FD’s obligation arises. My argument responds to this second characterization of the the FD’s obligations. Why wait until the fire spreads to the subscriber’s property, when the best course of action (and perhaps the agreement itself) is to prevent it from spreading?
Yes, I do:
Let’s say I agree to “protect your house from fire.” One day, you call and say, “Hey, there’s an uncontrolled fire next to my house.” I say, “So? Is your house on fire? If not, call me when your house is on fire, then I’ll come out there.” The fire spreads to your house. You call me back and say, “Hey, my house is on fire.” I say, “On my way!” I speed over there and put out the fire, but part of your roof has been damaged to the tune of $75.
Have I breached our agreement? Or, did I fulfill my obligation to “protect your from fire?” It seems to me, that under that agreement, I had an obligation to prevent the fire from spreading to your house, not just show up once your house was actually on fire.
Now, maybe the agreement between neighbor and FD was limited to “putting out” any fires on the property. I don’t know that, do you? As a neighbor, I would prefer “protection.” As a public servant, trying to maximize services provided to the paying members of the community, I would think that they would offer protection, and not wait for a fire to actually spread onto a parcel before addressing it. I imagine a small grass fire on a non-subscriber’s property, becoming a large grass fire on a subscriber’s property.
Saying that Farmers offers “fire protection” is just incorrect, and maybe that’s the problem: you don’t know what protection means. Farmers offers insurance products, which protect against financial loss in case of damage to persons or property, they do not protect against the causes of such damage.
I don’t think answer is as clear as you think it is. What if the subscriber was not home? What if Crannick called the FD and said, “Guys, I got big fire here, it’s burning my house down and it could spread to my neighbor’s property too!” What contractual obligation does the FD have, if any? What moral obligation do they have? Should they prevent the fire from spreading, or wait until it actually encroaches?
October 6, 2010, 7:34 pmOwen H. says:
You are still arguing that the fire company is obligated to protect the property of nonsubscribers. That’s the problem with that kind of system, and the problem I’ve always pointed out about those demanding lower taxes no matter what; everyone wants services but no one wants to pay the bills. You want the fact that the neighbor paid to mean that Cranick gets protection too, but still doesn’t have to pay his bills.
October 6, 2010, 8:41 pmlucia says:
Ted–
I know. But you made answered a rherorical question and made conclusions based on your interpretation of “protection”.
I see the confusion. I was using “actually” as a modifier
that means “at the present moment” and/or “really”. So I meant a real honest to goodness fire that was, at the present moment burning on the neighbor’s property. I meant “actually” to distinguish from “hypothetical fires that might start burning sometime in the future” See princeton.edu for word usage.
I see know that you thought I meant they only responded to fires that had first been set on the subscribers lot, and I see how what I wrote could be interpreted either way. I would have clarified this imprecision in my language if you’d asked directly.
Interesting hypothetical, but we have no reason to think this is the “best” course of action nor do we have any reason to believe the agreement requires it. (That is, unless you have the agreement in hand.)
Let’s look at your definition or protection: Believe it or not, “hands half protected by shabby woolen mittens ” are protected relative to hands wearing no mittens. So, mittens can be called “protection” against the cold. Also, one fort could be said to provide “protection”, even if it provides less protection than a ring of forths.
Likewise, putting out out of control fires on the subscribers property is a form of “protection” even if some might consider it “half” protection relative to puttiing out fires on the subscribers properties and that of his neighbors.
So, it seems to me that even if the agreement specifically provides “protection” (which we do not know) , you have no idea whether that protection might not be limited to putting out fires actually on a subscribers property.
Of course. And fire departments often offer fire service, but in your rhetorical questions to your self, you’ve decided that this FD must have been offering what you call “protection” and that it must have been some really truly awesome full protection. But maybe just because you decided to call what the FD offer “protection”, that doesn’t mean what the agreement provides really meets the criteria you seem to insist on to use the word “protection”.
It seems to me, just as a fire insurance agreement protects something associated with fire, the service the FD department provides protects against something associated with fire. (In once case, it’s financial loss. In the other, however much further spreading they can prevent after they arrive.)
The purpose of my insurance example was precisely to illustrate this misunderstanding that might be arising. You have been assuming the FD agreement is for “protection”.
Who knows? When you offered “protection”, how did you describe the details? Sounds like you left these important details out of your hypothetical. I’m betting I only paid for a policy that covered you putting out a fire that had actual (i.e. not hypothetical) fires at my house while letting my neighbor take care of his own house. So, you probably haven’t breached.
How about this: Cranick has a fire insurance policy from Farmers which protects them against financial loss. It protected against loss in a fire. Turns out, the policy isn’t going to fully compensate them for the full financial loss. The Cranicks are still going to sustain a loss. Is Farmer’s breaching?
I already said I don’t know. However, I’d like to point out you seemed to say you did know:
Since in the present post, you tell me you “protect” means more than just putting out fires on the property, I take this to mean you were saying that the agreement required more than putting out fires on the property. Moreover, you said this:
Since you now admit you don’t know the FD’s obligations under the agreement, you don’t know if it failed.
How is this different from what actually happened. Cranick called. Everyone knows fires can spread. The fire department did not come. Evidently, the FD thinks it had no contractual obligation to respond if the subscribing neighbor’s property had not had already started to burn. In contrast, if Cranick has said the neighbor’s property was actually burning, then the FD would be required to come.
Moral? If a neighbors house was actually burning, and you didn’t know whether people were inside, the FD would have had a moral, legal and contractual obligation to respond.
Absent a contractual obligation to prevent spreading, they had no moral obligation to put it out until the neighbors property had actually started to burn. Moreover, if their trucks carry finite amounts of water, they might find themselves unable to put out fires on the subscriber’s lot if they use the water at the Cranick’s instead of letting it burn out as fires sometimes do. Or, the firefighters might be exhausted from putting out Cranick’s fire.
From that point of view, it might be in the best interest of the subscriber to save their resources so as to better protect the subscribers property and interests.
October 6, 2010, 9:15 pmart says:
If a contract is required by policy and procedure and there was not a contract with the owner the FD did not have any legal right to be on their property. What would protect the FD of any legal action?
October 7, 2010, 12:57 amPeter says:
Galilleo,
The vision of a volunteer firefighter standing still while a house is burning, is behind my compreension. This is surrealistic. But, then again, that’s not the issue here. The sistem is all wrong. You insist I should put my money where my mouth is. Man, mandatory taxes; everyboy pays, according to their earnings. Is my moral obligation as a citizen. More than that: you can´t decline to pay. How about that? The alternative is that you only have what you’re willing to pay. Thats pure business. Let’s imagine this: we are talking about property safety, right? How about a volunteer police force, standing in front of a house, while a gang of robbers load the truck with the house furnitures? Well, the owner did’t pay the bill, so… Next one is your house. Like the fire.
October 7, 2010, 5:41 amOwen H. says:
Simply put, the residents of the county don’t want to pay taxes, but still want fire services to come out to them. And now they are angry because the subscription plan they voted for instead has a negative result. They want the town to subsidize their no-tax desires.
October 7, 2010, 7:04 amPeter says:
Simplier put: America gone crazy. Don’ let it burn, though.
October 7, 2010, 7:53 amlucia says:
Owen H.
It’s not clear the citizens are angry. The first report said they were. But the evidence was that someone went to the fire station and punched a fireman. That someone was Cranick’s son. We really only know Cranick’s son was angry; we don’t know other county dwellers are angry.
October 7, 2010, 7:55 amgallileo says:
Peter,
I’m with you man, the correct solution to the broader problem is indeed mandatory taxes. No disagreement. But in a country where people are allowed to vote on the type of government or taxes that they want, and what to provide with those services, sometimes people are going to make a decision I disagree with. Which is exactly what the people of this county did. Should a higher level of government step in and force them all to pay it? Perhaps. But when does it end?
So until they vote for mandatory taxes–or we federalize fire service–the people of the county are stuck with a system they chose. And this situation will inevitably come up again.
So why are the fire fighters morally obligated to put out that fire? Simply because it was within their power under the current system to stop it?
Well, it is within your power to stop the next one. You can do it just as easily right now as they could that one. Save the next house–we are relying on you.
If you say “no”, then you are just as bad and callous as those guys.
October 7, 2010, 10:16 amGo Gators says:
Thats circular reasoning, the problem with libertarian philosophy is that people won’t accept the consequences? but if everyone was a libertarian then they would. So the issue lies with the problem of socialist tendencies, not libertarianism. In short, your saying because some will always desire socialism, libertarianism fails.
October 7, 2010, 10:57 amTed says:
Lucia,
I’m pretty much on board with you now. Two things:
My characterization of the agreement as “protecting” was in response to your initial characterization of the agreement as “putting out” fires that “actually started.” I understand, and understood, that they’re both hypothetical. My comment regarding breach of contract against the FD was offered in the context of such an agreement.
So the FD does not have a moral duty to prevent damage to a subscriber’s property even if damage to that property is imminent? I think this is incorrect. Generally, a FD has a duty to extinguish fires that are uncontrolled and threaten life or property. In a tax-based system, at least where I live, they come and put out any uncontrolled fires, even if they don’t threaten serious damage.
Think of a county tax based system. A fire starts outside the county line, on public lands. The fire is going to grow. The county can either wait for it to encroach on a taxpayer’s property, at which time the fire may be uncontrollable, or it could extinguish the fire early, before it spreads. Any idea of what the FD should do, morally? Why should the FD’s duty change under a subscriber system as applied to subscribers?
It seems a lot of people want to punish Crannick for being an idiot. The problem is, that punishment came at the expense (albeit minor in this case) of a subscribing neighbor. If the FD could have contained the fire before it spread to the subscriber’s property, it should have done so.
Oh and I have to address this:
Maybe? I am unclear about your terms. You say that the policy “protects Crannick against financial loss.” But then you say that the “policy” isn’t going to “fully compensate them for the full financial loss.” Did you mean to say “Farmers” is not going to compensate Crannick? Or, did you mean that the policy itself contained limits, and the amount of financial loss exceeded those limits.
In case of the former, Farmers breached the contract as written; it did not perform its obligation to protect against financial loss. In case of the latter, Farmers did not breach, assuming it compensated up to the limits described. Either limits are part of the agreement or they are not.
So, what to do with stupid people? I have a solution. Publicly funded fire services should not cover any regional areas that do not pay. The entire area (district?) that voted not to be taxed (or voluntarily pay a set amount for coverage of all properties) should receive no fire services at all by a publicly funded FD. Hopefully, they would reconsider their stupidity and vote for taxes or a flat fee.
If they individually want to contract with a private FD, so be it. I would feel a lot more comfortable with Fires-R-Us, Inc. standing by, watching a house burn than with a publicly funded FD watching. It never works well when a public entity crosses into the private sector, there are simply too many conflicts of interest. Government entities are held to a much higher standard than private entities, as it should be. Privates entities only need to worry about profits, and that is expected.
October 7, 2010, 12:04 pmPeter says:
Galileo,
Your first two paragraphs: that’s it. We get what we choose. Those folks choose that way? They don’t want a higher level of government to step in? No mandatory taxes? Ok, let it be. I won’t send the troops, I promise;)
The next paragraphs? I still don’ get it. What are you talking about? I would save my neighbors house, if I had a fire engine loaded with water, if I knew how to use that, off course.
Go Gators,
I know a few places in the world where everyone is a libertarian. In Africa, for example, there are territories where the state doesn’t bother al all; it doesn’t even exist, for the sake of your freedom. The problem is most libertarians (all of them, in fact), our libertarians, are just full of air and don’t have the guts. Much better keeping complaining about socialism.
October 7, 2010, 12:25 pmGallileo says:
Peter,
Would you save your neighbor’s house if, when you decided to buy the truck, you asked him to help and he declined? If, the next year, you asked him to cover a bit of the maintenance bill, and he declined? If the next year, you fought a fire three houses down and asked him to kick in a bit to help cover the costs of that, and he declined?
And the year after that you helped out the other neighbor two houses down, who then didn’t pay you back even half of your costs?
If you would, good on you–you have the chance right now. Go write the check for the next guy who hasn’t paid for his fire coverage. It’s within your power. Write the check now.
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses, I guess. I don’t believe in it for banks, and I don’t believe in it for fire service.
October 7, 2010, 12:53 pmGallileo says:
Peter,
I guess you just need to make a case here why those guys are obligated to stop it and you aren’t obligated to stop the next one.
Is it because:
It was within their power?–Stopping the next one is within your power.
They were close?–You are close enough to stop the next one.
It was an emergency?–You can anticipate the next emergency.
They knew the victim?–We can narrow the next victim down to about 200 families–is that enough to abrogate your responsibility?
They knew the time?–This one is harder, but statistically, it is very likely to happen in the next year. Is that enough to abrogate your responsibility?
The way I see it, every single argument for them putting out the fire applies equally to you and to me for stopping the next one. Now, if you want to argue that everyone involved in this situation is morally corrupt, including you and me, OK–I’ll agree to that. But if you want to argue that the firefighters are worse than everone else, well you need to make some kind of moral distinction between what they could have done about this one and what you can do about the next one.
October 7, 2010, 1:02 pmPeter says:
Gallileo,
You didn’t understand what I meant, my fault. I would help my neighbor, for free, but I’m not in the business of firefigthting and I don’t have the money to buy a truck. Let me rephrase what I said: I would throw a bucket of water. Ok, now?
October 7, 2010, 1:28 pmLet me break the circle, too: I already said I’m in favour of mandatory taxes; I’m in favour of another sistem. The community shouldn’t rely on my habilities to protect them from fires or anything related with the safety of their properties or themselves.
Ted says:
Do you buy my distinction? That the fire fighters are worse than me because I would not have let the fire damage the neighbor’s property, because I would have responded to the initial call to ensure that did not happen? Does that make me better than the FD?
October 7, 2010, 1:35 pmPeter says:
Gallileo:
One more thing
1 – Some guys with a fire engine
2 – Firefighters
4 – Volunteers, no risk of being fired
2 – Standing in front of this house
3 – House on fire
Would I be too arrogant if I said they should pull the damn f***g hose pipe and throw water in there? Im sorry.
October 7, 2010, 1:45 pmGallileo says:
Ted:
The initial call for the next fire is out right now. Write the check now and put your money where your mouth is. No, you won’t? You are no better than these fire men. You talk a good fight, but you have the power to stop the next one just like they had the power to stop this one.
And yet you stand there, refusing to help just because the fire hasn’t started? Got it. Post a bond, payable when the fire does start. Unwilling? Well, talk is cheap now isn’t it?
Peter:
Short term we have a real tragedy here–I wish it hadn’t happened. But short term thinking by Mr. Crannick and the rest of the damn county got them into this situation in the first place. That the whole county was thinking short term is no reason to condemn the firemen.
Volunteer firemen can be removed from their job for insubordination. If the guys at the scene had put out the fire, they very likely would be removed. And boom, no fire protection for anyone. That’s pretty selfish of Mr. Crannick.
And the chief can’t magically make funding appear and he runs the department on a shoe string. He worked out a deal with the county so that those who wanted coverage could have coverage. If that agreement fails to work, there will be no coverage for anyone, because not enough people are willing to pay taxes.
Great. Great solution. Save this house, let the next one burn.
The most interesting thing about this whole situation to me will be how the county responds. Will they vote in the next election for coverage?
October 7, 2010, 2:03 pmTed says:
Perhaps you misunderstand me. I am saying that I would have done a better job than the FD did for what it was paid by the neighbor to do. The neighbor’s property would not have been burned if the FD did its job and fulfilled its duty to the neighbor to stop an uncontrolled fire near its property from damaging the property. They could have come out under the initial call, evaluated the situation, watched Crannick’s house burn, and then stopped the fire from encroaching on the neighbor’s property, then they would have done the job that they were paid to do in the best way possible. You do think that a person should do what they’re paid to do, right?
Now, legally, we can squabble about what the terms of the agreement were, but as a moral question, it would have been morally superior for the FD to come out, watch Crannick’s place burn to the ground, but stop the fire from spreading to a paying customer, because that’s what its job was to do for the neighbor.
Now why would you think the solution to this is to pay the FD extra money to do the job they were already paid to do? What kind of incentives in terms of personal responsibility does that create on behalf of the FD? Do a shitty job, get paid more? I guess they are government workers…
But I’m not going to write a check for FD that doesn’t even protect the people who pay in the first place. I don’t give a shit about Crannick, but I think the FD should do what it was paid to do, and do a good job of it.
October 7, 2010, 2:55 pmGallileo says:
Ted,
You are changing the subject. Whether or not the FD fulfilled both its legal and moral obligation with respect to the neighbor’s property is between the neighbour and the FD. I’m sure the neighbour, having paid for service, will take steps if he feels he didn’t get a reasonable return.
Whether or not it fulfilled its legal and moral obligation to Crannick is what I’m discussing.
October 7, 2010, 3:03 pmTed says:
Oh. I thought you were asking for a reason as to why the FD did not act as it should have. I agree that Crannick got what was coming to him. I disagree that neighbor got what was coming to him. The former is Crannick’s fault. The latter is the FD’s fault, for acting immorally and potentially in breach of its agreement.
October 7, 2010, 3:15 pmTed says:
Here, this is what I responded to:
Those guys, the FD, are obligated to stop Crannick’s fire in order to protect the property of the neighbor. I am not obligated to stop it, because I was not paid to protect the neighbor’s property.
October 7, 2010, 3:35 pmPeter says:
Gallileo,
Yeah, sure, and the entire state would collapse, if the fire men dared to spit in the house. Is that the foundations of our nation? Well, it will collapse, eventually. And when did we start thinking that the “moral obligations” are based only in a written contract and a fee?
October 7, 2010, 3:49 pmGallileo says:
Ted–you don’t know the terms of the contract and neither do I. So neither one of us can say whether or not the terms were fulfilled properly.
Peter–I don’t think the moral obligations are based on written contract. Nor do I think the entire state will collapse if these guys fought the fire.
But the South Fulton Fire Department has had trouble getting funded. 80% of its calls are to people who don’t pay taxes to support them. In the past they have taken a “work it out later” approach and that has bitten them in the ass. In the past they asked for the country solve a collective action problem by voting to tax themselves. The county declined.
If they had put this particular fire out, then the world wouldn’t have collapsed. But do that enough times and the fire protection–for both those who want to pay and those who don’t–will collapse. And no one is better off under that system except the guys who got the free ride.
At some point, you’ve got to stop.
October 7, 2010, 4:00 pmTed says:
I will add that my position is primarily a moral position, but could become a legal position if it appears a contract was breached.
October 7, 2010, 4:09 pmlucia says:
First– who judges what is “imminent”? You? After the fact? Based on skimpy information about the fire, terrain, resources etc.?
Irrespective of the answer, we differ on our view what constitutes a “moral duty”. I think the FD has a no moral duty to put out fires for non-subscribers. I don’t see how the contractual obligation to a subscriber creates a moral duty to do more for the subscriber than the contract requires.
Well… I don’t know because once again, you leave all the important detais out of your hypothetical and then ask a question that can’t be answered absent knowledge of those details.
In your hypothetical, is the fire fighters psychic? Or do they only have ordinary skills of predicting things? Do they really know that the fire is going to spread to their county? Given their resources expertise and knowlegdge of the terrain, what do they (not you) judge to be the steps that would minimize damage to their county residents?
Now to attempt to answer your question, I will just guess what the details you omitted might be based on what makes sense.
In the real world, (as opposed to a utopian dream) it certain the county FD will have limited rather than infinite resources. In a rural area, it’s likely fire hydrants will not be present at every single point in the adjacent county. To fight the neighboring fires, the Obion county trucks would have to carry a limited amount of water on a limited number of trucks to extinguish any rural fire. Actions that maximize protection to the residents of Obion county might be to
a) Let the fire rage in the adjacent county.
b) Create a fire break– possibly ordering farmers at the border to mow down as many combustible crops as possible. (For example: If there is dry corn or grass in a field, order the farmer to mow that down and haul it away. and
c) Man the border with the other county with every single fire truck to put out flames as they cross into obion county.
Seems to me firefighter do similar things in many rural areas.
So, my answer to your question about the moral course is: I think the most moral course will probably be to let the fire rage in the neighboring county and use their resources to protect the county border.
It shouldn’t. Their contractual obligation to protect Obion county does not create a moral obligation for them to put out fires in the adjacent county. The most moral course may very well be to let the fire rage.. Similarly, their contratual obligation to put out the fire for a subscriber does not create a moral obligation to put out fires on the adjacent neighbor’s property. The most moral course may be to let the neighbor’s house burn down.
Some may; I don’t.
I mean for some reason not stated in the hypothetical, Farmers isn’t going to compensate them for the full financial loss. More importantly, in my hypothetical I have intentionally omitted critical information from my hypothetical: In my hypothetical, neither you, nor I, have any idea whether the policy contains limits. Maybe the policy has no limits. Maybe it has limits. I am asking you to answer my hypothetical while remaining ignorant of this detail.
Does this seem odd to you? It sort of is. The reason I ommitted key information is because you created a hypothetical in which you had given me fire protection but you failed to describe the extent of the protection offerred. You then asked me to answer whether or not “you” had breached your agreement. Note that I answered your question about whether you breached with, “Who knows? When you offered “protection”, how did you describe the details? Sounds like you left these important details out of your hypothetical.”
Now for your answer to my hypothetical:
Yep. And in the hypothetical you created for me, either the “protection” you offerred had limits or it did not. But you didn’t describe them. Like you, I could only answer by speculating what the limits might be. So thank you for addressing this as it is precisely a problematic issue I was trying getting you to notice in your hypothetical question.
Always? By everyone?
It seems to me what you claim here is obviously untrue. Sometimes private entities are held to higher standard than the government by nearly everyone,; sometimes the government is held to higher standards by nearly everyone. Sometimes, people disagree on the which type of entity should be held to a higher standard.
Ted to Gallileo:
Not to intrude on your argument with Gallileo, but have you ever put out a fire on your neighbor’s property? Are you a volunteer fireman? Have you spent any time training in anticipation of this eventuality? Have you spent money to equip yourself with hoses and water to be able to do this, should it occur? Do you man a call line to respond to your neighbor in their time of need?
Unless you have voluntered, trained, provisioned yourself and are manning a phone line, I would say that your merely guessing how you would respond to the Cranick’s initial call does not make you better than the South Fulton FD.
Yes. And it appears they did.
Excuse me, but didn’t you already admit you don’t know what the contract requires them to do for the neighbor? How does your logic hold up if the sentence just ends with “because”.
Have you forgotten that you already admitted you don’t know what’s in the agreement? As far as you, or I or anyone knows, the FD did what they were paid to do.
Of course the FD should do what it was paid to do and do it well. As far as we know, the FD does precisely what it has been paid to do and does a good job. Seems to me rather likely that they did do a good job. Has the neighbor who paid complained of poor service? Have the tax payers of South Fulton, who also pay complained? As far as I can tell, the answer to both questions is “no”. Given the lack of complaints by those who actually pay (as opposed to you), I see no reason to think the South Fulton FD didn’t do precisely what the people who paid them contracted them to do. I’m under the impression you didn’t pay them anything. Am I mistaken?
For all you or I know, it may be the case that if the FD did what you prefer, the FD might have been doing something those who paid them did not want them to do, which whether you like it or not might be to provide free services to people who have refused to pay.
I think the argument you provide for your moral position is flimsier than a wet piece of generic toilet paper. :)
October 8, 2010, 11:43 amTheStone says:
How long have you all been diagnosed with Asperger’s?
October 11, 2010, 3:21 pm