Fire Fighters Refuse to Fight Fire, Homeowners Forgot to Pay Fee

Dominion, judgment, and society

An underlying theme of this situation, from Keith Olbermann and Chris Hayes:

OLBERMANN: Before we get to Beck and the—you know, "I say let them crash" crowd, what is resonating here and why is it resonating?

HAYES: I think it's resonating because it's sort of the reductio ad absurdum entirety of the kind of Tea Party, John Galt, you're on your own agenda. I mean, the idea that every single last thing is a matter of individuals.

Margaret Thatcher famously said there's no such thing as society, there's just individuals and that there are no public goods, there is sort of self or solidarity. There's nothing, absolutely nothing that weigh [sic] do collectively as a society that we sort of mutually agree to that we bind each other to through the formal government, through paying taxes and receiving public services.

The extremism of the view that refutes that, which is substantiated in the policy in this county is when you're faced with the consequences of it, it's so morally abhorrent that I think it really—it does resonate because it's a picture of what a certain section of the political spectrum is trying to drive us towards.

OLBERMANN: All right. Beck and the crowd from "The National Review," who, for the most part, with the exception of Dan Foster to some degree, I think he gets a little check mark next to his name for expressing sort of the human point of view on this as opposed to the robot viewpoint, or the Ayn Rand viewpoint, they were all focusing on how well the system worked instead of questioning the whole system itself, weren't they?

HAYES: Right, exactly. I mean, that's so interesting, right?

You're talking about this moral hazard problem.

The point is that, as you said in the beginning, this is why you do not structure these services in this way. And, in fact, in a sort of interesting way, right, it's sort of an argument for single-payer health care. I mean, the whole thing Michael Moore makes in his film "SiCKO" is that we have single-payer firefighting.

And the reason we have single-payer firefighting is exactly to avoid this kind of situation. We all pay our taxes. We all receive this universal benefit and there's a tremendous amount of political science literature and sort of comparative political economy that shows that these are kinds of structures that are most efficient that work best.

So, Social Security is the same thing. We all pay in. We all universally receive the benefit.

When you look at the health care bill, right, it makes you wonder about how we would design a fire department today in the face of kind of right-wing obstruction and corporate interest, because the health care bill is basically mandatory insurance, right? It requires everyone to buy the equivalent of fire insurance and it sanctions them if they don't, as supposed to just having this neat and somewhat simple and efficient single-payer system.

OLBERMANN: We did, by the way, in many parts of the country, try firefighting by subscription.

HAYES: Yes.

OLBERMANN: And one of the results, I believe, about 1770 or so was that New York burned out.

HAYES: Yes.

OLBERMANN: Not really a big sort of Chicago fire. It was a smaller town at that point. I may have the year wrong by quite a lot. But just to indicate we did try this before and prove—

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: There were badges on the building.

OLBERMANN: On the buildings. Yes, excellent. And then otherwise you let it go up in smoke and they'd realize that really doesn't work long term if you have any buildings within, say, a half mile of the fire.

HAYES: Exactly.

OLBERMANN: All right. We have here ideological people for whom empirical results like that mean nothing. Would Beck have been saying the same thing if people had been injured in this fire or killed? I mean, do we know the on-demand fire department would not have stood back and let people been injured or killed? Isn't theoretically that part of this equation?

I mean, do we know if they would have stopped it if, you know, the five adjoining homes didn't subscribe at a square mile of Tennessee went up in flames as a result?

HAYES: No, absolutely. And I mean, moral hazard is moral hazard, right? So, if you really want to bring the hammer down, if you really want to disincentivize not paying your $75, nothing would do that like a bunch of third-degree burns or, you know, Lord forbid, a casualty in the family, right? I mean, that would really—I mean, to use Jonah Goldberg's logic, right, you'd really think twice about not paying the $75.

The whole point is it shouldn't be an opt-in subscription service. I mean—and you can imagine extending this to all sorts of things. I mean, blessedly, we have rules that hospital emergency rooms have to take patients. But on can imagine punitive measures being undertaken by certain right-wing state legislatures try to repeal that, right, to check people are, I don't know, up on their taxes, for instance, or have paid all their bills or check the credit rating of people that got dropped off at the emergency room with a bullet to the chest.

I mean, what you're seeing here is—are two things. One is a kind of ideological commitment to this principle that there is no public sector, there are no public goods. The other, I think, a more kind of dispositional aspect that's really part of conservatism going very far back and manifesting the Tea Party with a sheer punitive kind of contempt in the face of suffering.

I mean, you know, Kevin Williamson calling people ingrates and losers and jerks. That runs through the whole kind of Ayn Rand Galtian framework and you see it in all the Rick Santelli rants and Tea Party talk about sponges and moochers, this contempt for people as supposed to just sort of basic human compassion.​

And from the same episode, Robert Reich:

OLBERMANN: What's the argument here? Why is it morally better to have a system in which those who can and do pay—they get the fire department service, and those who do not, lose their homes?

REICH: Well, at least the conservative argument as I understand it, and it is a little bit hard to understand it carried to this extent, is that people need to bear the consequences of their own behavior. That creates a better society.

Now, obviously, people do need to bear the consequences of their own behavior, but carried to a degree like we have here, where somebody who forgets to pay the $75 fee or somebody who is unfortunate enough to have something bad happen to them, doesn't get help really does create a very different—fundamentally different kind of society than the society you and I and most former conservatives, people who used to talk about community, really see and understand.

OLBERMANN: What—is there an end game here? I mean, if they applaud a man's home burning down over a $75 fee, what is the ideal economic system they would establish if they could? Is this the next economy that you're talking about in the title of your book?

REICH: Well, I hope not. Although there is a movement, Keith, to have a kind of—well, I call it social Darwinism, a survival of the fittest. If we coddle people—this is kind of a tough love idea. If we coddle people, if we save people from the consequences of what they do, society gets flaccid, it gets kind of morally bankrupt.

We saw a little bit of this in the first days and actually the first years of the Great Depression. Herbert Hoover and his secretary of the treasury, Andrew Mellon, said, we ought to purge the rot out of the system. Let people basically stew in their own juices. Don't save anybody. Don't do anything. Government has no role. Just balance the budget.

But, you see, we are in a very complicated society. We are interdependent. We do need each other, and that kind of view gets us just deep into trouble—deeper into trouble.

OLBERMANN: Yes, I'm paying for his fire truck when he needs it and he's paying for my medical insurance when I need it. That's the premise of the interdependence. It's not more complicated than that.

But back to this other idea, this replacement society. Who benefits from pushing and implementing these kind of economic philosophies? Is there a real motive behind—oh, yes, just the survival of the fittest?

REICH: Well, I think the ulterior motive is very clear. I mean, if you are already well connected, if you are very wealthy, if you basically don't have to worry about all of these services, if you can take care of yourself, then the notion that we're not all in it together is very comforting. You don't have to pay for them. You don't have to worry about them because we against them and them and they are the people that would otherwise take from us who have it all.

And, Keith, in this kind of society right now, unfortunately, we have never seen—at least since the 1920s and the 1890s, the era of the robber barons—this degree of concentration of income and wealth. And so, you have a lot of people who are very comfortable, don't have to worry about their house burning down, don't have to worry about not having protection, they can get private security guards.

And they are, in effect, saying to themselves, we don't want to pay with our tax dollars or anything else for the protection or the well-being of them. Let them take care of themselves.

OLBERMANN: What about the people who don't want that to be America? Are there Democrats who are going to stand up for this? Is this—is this man's story is not supposed to be somebody's campaign? Are we not supposed to ask every Tea Partier and Republican where they stand on Gene Cranick's house?

REICH: Well, hopefully, we don't have to go through this particular instance every time.

OLBERMANN: Yes.

REICH: But there are a lot of issues. I mean, look what we just had a big debate about unemployment insurance and the Republicans again and again said, no, we don't want to extend unemployment insurance because that will deter people from getting jobs.

They forgot the basic reality that is that there are five people for every job opening right now and in most states unemployment insurance only pays a fraction of the normal wage. So, why would anybody want to take unemployment insurance if they had a job available? No, it doesn't work that way.

But again and again, we are seeing in this coming election, whether the issue is health care or unemployment insurance or the issue is what do we do about jobs overall, the unemployment situation—the fundamental question, the fundamental question, Keith, is: are you on your own or are we all in this together?

And I think Democrats have to say over and over and over again in a civil society, in a modern society and there is a society—Margaret Thatcher, remember, said there was no such thing as a society. But in a society there are very important ways in which we're all in this together because through no fault of your own, you might get into trouble. You might be drowning and if you didn't pay for your beach sticker, you would not otherwise get the lifeguard to save you.

OLBERMANN: Yes. That's one step removed from where we are right now.​

The fundamental question, as I see it, reaches to the root of the human social endeavor. Many people these days want the pretense of society: roads, jails, sewers, and the like, but also would prefer to slice that up into a subscription-only service. It's partly a matter of how they experience empowerment. Some only feel empowered if they can exclude others; I would suggest a lack of imagination on their own part insofar as they cannot experience empowerment without holding some sort of judgmental dominion over other people.

Personally, this is what I've always disdained about conservatism in general, but as we witness the attempted purification of the philosophy in Tea Party hands, the issue becomes remarkably defined. The simplicity of the outlook is what creates such exemplary definition; if there is deeper nuance to be considered, the advocates are not bringing those aspects to the fore.

And what we have here is an example of what such a would-be Social Darwinist outlook brings. What slays me in this example is that the Department apparently had no system in place to bill people after the fact. In such a light, the system seems more punitive than it does functional. Dominion and judgment, indeed.

(Note: The burning of New York that Mr. Hayes referred to is apparently the Great Fire of New York in September, 1776; various estimates suggest that between ten percent and a quarter of the city was damaged or destroyed. Harder to find is the idea of badges or symbols on the buildings denoting which were entitled to firefighting services. The idea sounds nearly Biblical, though that, I suppose, is for another discussion.)
____________________

Notes:

MSNBC. "'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Tuesday, October 5". Transcript. October 6, 2010. MSNBC.com. October 9, 2010. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39536373/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/

Wikipedia. "Great Fire of New York (1776)". September 23, 2010. Wikipedia.org. October 9, 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_New_York_(1776)

Correction:

The transcript of Keith Olbermann's interview of Chris Hayes has been modified to specifically designate an error in the transcript, which has been reproduced otherwise directly from the source page.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Yeah, but waiting there and watching the house burn just to be sure that the surrounding won't catch fire is just plain stupid and a huge loss of time they could invest doing something else like saving something/one else. This is about practicality. This wasn't a rundown wood hut somewhere far away from civilisation where in the nearest surrounding would be a tree at most. If I was the neighbour I'd be fucking mad at the fire fighters for letting this potential threat burn on right next to my house, not even mentioning the smoke which certainly isn't healthy! Plus it would also bother me to have black ruins right next to my house as it devalues the location of my property in an aesthetical way.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

If that bothers the neighbors, then they should have paid the $75 fee for him in advance. If they weren't willing to pay that, because it wasn't worth it to them, that isn't the neighboring City's fault.

They should be mad at the owner of the burned home. You know, the guy who refused to be a responsible homeowner and buy the service when it was available? The guy who--knowing he was too fucking cheap to pay for fire protection--irresponsibly and intentionally set fires on his property?

The fire department didn't burn that house down. The homeowner did. The neighbors should should sue him.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

What I find more illuminating is not one of these shows has mentioned that the City has TRIED to get the County to go to Universal Coverage for the paltry fee of $3 per month house and been turned down by the County.
Attempts to make the City the bad guy are so transparent when they make it just about this specific $75 fee.
The point is more than half the residents don't sign up and when they put out a fire, half the residents don't pay the costs associated ($500) forget the piddly fee.

Why do you think they leave these points out?

As to what slays you,

NOPE, from the Fire Chiefs proposal for Universal coverage:

That's the problem.
If they show up and put out the fire and the person hasn't subscribed, there is NO LEGAL CONTRACT between them that they can use to collect the money.

Even if they showed up and got them to sign a contract before they put out the fire, the homeowners could still not pay because they would simply claim they signed under duress.

Arthur

 

How am I supposed to know, as a neighbour, that my neighbour isn't paying his fees? It doesn't make a difference, since the others paid the fees and I presume that by paying the fees the firefighters are in charge to save the homes from any potential threat concerning fire and that in an EFFECTIVE way. What if the fire would have gone out of control? Is the fee the people pay for the fire department just there to pay their lame ass 'watching how the house burns down' attitude while leaving my property for several hours near a potential threat, while wasting time on doing nothing but watching the fireworks and thus not being available for any other sudden urgent case that could appear at any given time? If someone's being cheap here then it's the fire department who whines because of $75 missing and due to that leaves the whole neighbourhood in danger while their services remain unusable for several hours for other people who most probably paid for their services.

 

Perhaps because some find the point irrelevant

I would guess it's because the $75 fee is what qualifies a building for the master list that dictates which structures qualify for fire coverage.

To the other, one of the issues that is up in the air is where the fire department sits in the tax structure. And this is another of the underlying themes. Smaller government, less taxes, subscribe for vital services; it sounds good to some in theory, but this situation is an example of what that philosophy brings.

If the municipality is being painted as the "bad guy", it probably has something to do with the attitudes of the individual firefighters, who gnashed their teeth—and some of whom were, literally, physically sick—at the order to sit by and watch the house burn; an order, incidentally, that allegedly came from a fire chief via cellular phone while he played golf.

In the end, though, if the city is the bad guy, it is because a representative of the city—e.g., the golfing fire chief—would prefer to endanger people and property by leaving a home to burn for what really do seem like punitive reasons.

 

It was not hard for me to find for me...thanks be unto google:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_insurance_marks

This is not about social darwinism to me, so Olberman and Reich demolished a series of straw men as far as I can see. In fact this isn't even a liberal/conservative argument...conservatives like countzero clearly agree with liberals like you.

This is libertarians versus everyone else, because only the libertarians wonder why communities should be denied the liberty to establish subscription-based fire protection services if that is what people there generally want. Again, not that every community should have them (I suspect only a handful would), but if that is what the residents want, then the system should be permitted...and that some people change their minds *after* the fire happens, should not give those people the right to destroy the agreed upon system for the community as a whole.

The city that was providing this service was adding value to the world. If the city is to be punished because the service they offered was, in your view, not good enough (because it wasn't given to everyone), then the obvious solution is for no one to ever offer such services to neighboring communities. If I offer my neighbor something of value, and that neighbor bitches and moans that he demands an even more valuable gift, then that neighbor should expect no more offers in the future--not better offers.

The other option is that the neighboring community will (to entice the city to keep offering the service) have to pay the city *more* for the service (so that the city receives, in effect, the full $75 fee on behalf of everyone in that area.

The current proposals seem to be to demand that the city lose money on the service it provides to its neighbors. And everyone who proposes it then gets a smug superior look, because of how much more moral they are than their opponents and those terrible and despicable firefighters.

But wait a year or two, because the taxpayers in the city are not going to pay money that gets funneled into neighboring communities to provide them with subsidized fire protection services. This is actually either the end of that city helping out its neighbors at all, or the beginning of demands by the city of neighboring communities to pay them more money to cover the city's losses...with a concomitant rise in taxes for the taxpayers in those neighboring communities. (And some then no doubt accuse the fire department of "gouging", because the city's good deed of volunteering to provide this service cannot go unpunished as far as some will be concerned).

 

Thank ye

Many thanks; I was, quite clearly, using the wrong search terms.

I'll give some thought to the rest of your post later. As it is, I'm running behind schedule at the moment.

 

It's not up in the air at all.

On January 19, 1987, the Obion County Commission passed a resolution establishing an Obion County Fire Department, but no action was taken to implement the resolution. Therefore, Obion County has a county fire department on paper, but is unmanned, unfunded and not operational.

Obion Countys funding for the Fire Dept is $0.00.

They don't pay for any equipment, any people, any training, any firestations.

NADA

ZIP

ZILCH

ZERO.

In the existing system, over 75% of the City's call outs are for COUNTY residents, but only HALF of the people they were called out for paid the $500 fee. Since there was no contract with the County, the fire dept couldn't collect.

The City taxpayers were subsidizing the County taxpayers.

To end this inequitable situation the Mayor and the Fire Chiefs presented the County a proposal in March 2008 trying one last time to get the County to wise up and go with Universal Service (there are in fact 15 sq miles of Obion County with no service, contract or otherwise, which would be covered in the Universal plan).

http://troy.troytn.com/Obion County...tation Presented to the County Commission.pdf

The cost was a PIDDLY $3.00 per month per house.

$3.00 per month per house!

They were told to NO.

So, in July of 2008 they let a house burn.

Still the County did nothing.

So the County just got another reminder of what a Subscription fire system is all about.

No one has yet explained how the City somehow owes it to their deadbeat neighbors in the County to go on footing the bill for them, as they have done for the last two decades.

Arthur

 

This is sort of the opposite of this bit from The Onion:

Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department

CHEYENNE, WY—After attempting to contain a living-room blaze started by a cigarette, card-carrying Libertarian Trent Jacobs reluctantly called the Cheyenne Fire Department Monday. "Although the community would do better to rely on an efficient, free-market fire-fighting service, the fact is that expensive, unnecessary public fire departments do exist," Jacobs said. "Also, my house was burning down." Jacobs did not offer to pay firefighters for their service.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/libertarian-reluctantly-calls-fire-department,4651/

 

That was good Repo man...a libertarian until his house was on fire. I am sure there are a lot more like him out there.

 

Of course that is true. It's also true that, in a foxhole, many atheists will start praying...but that doesn't mean that atheism is philosopically wrong per se.

Moreover, in a typical community, the libertarian you describe is not necessarily being unethical as measured against his own values.

The hypothetical libertarian's taxes PAID for the fire department, just like everyone else's. There is no hypocrisy involved in using the service he paid for, unless the community exempted the libertarian from paying those taxes. If he was exempted from taxation, and then he called on the service anyway, that would be tough to justify (even if he offered to pay those taxes after the fact)...in other words, if this hypothetical person behaved as unethically as the Cranick family actually did, then I'd take your point.

Once you force him to pay for the service, why would he be ethically bound both to pay money *and* not to use the service he just paid for? "Libertarian" doesn't mean "one who rejects all government" as many only want a different balance than what we see.

Back to the foxhole point, even if a libertarian "cheats" in a crisis, that doesn't disprove the philosophical and economic point. Perhaps the reason we need to reject service to the Cranicks is precisely because libertarians are right, but that "cheating" by looking to the government in defiance to the libertarian solution, destroys that solution. When was Mr. Cranick more rational? When he decided not to pay the $75 premium for fire services, or when his house was on fire? I'd guess the former. So why assume that as between a rational Mr.Cranick and panicked Mr. Cranick, the latter is the only one who understands the "right" solution under his own utility function? A year from now, I'd predict there's at least a 50% chance that he decides not to pay that premium again (actually more than 50% if the outcome of the many complaints results in the rule that he can wait until his house is on fire to pay it).

Knowing that they will panic in a crisis, libertarians may want a subscription based service all the more. Why? Because setting it up binds their hands and allows them to make a rational decision that binds them even in their most irrational future moments. To return to my favorite simile, it's akin to Jason having himself bound to the mast. Approaching the isle of the Sirens, he knew that he did not want to die, but that if he heard their song he'd be overwhelmed by its beauty and compelled to either steer his ship into the reefs that surrounded the Sirens' home, or to try to swim to them, drowning in either case. So he had his men stop up their ears with wax and bind him to the ship's mast, so that he could not give in to the irrational impulse (even though that was very much what he wanted in the moment he heard the song). It's the same reason Cortez burned his ships, so that even if he or his men became overrun with emotion, they could not elect to sail for home.

In any event, the point is why shouldn't libertarians be free to band together and set up local communities in the manner that makes them happy? Why should they be forced to set things up in a way that makes *me* happy, when I don't live there? Why should we demand that liberty be limited to the freedom do things in exactly the same way as everyone else?

 

There are several things about this story that bother me.

1) That everyone was aware of who paid the fee and who didn't, seems sort of odd.
2) That to make a $75 point these people were willing to stand by as animals and hundreds of thousands and property damage occurred.
3) That not just one person, but several people were there and had the ability, training and tools to prevent it, but didn't.

I absolutely hate my neighbors to the left. We've had property border issues with a fence. Their teenage son broke into my home several years ago...etc. It is a nightmare. However, if their home was on fire, I would do everything in my power to help. (turn on my hose, call 911, etc)

Doesn't matter who they are or what they've done the past. The only thing that matters to me is who I am and what I do.

 

1) That's the point of a SUBSCRIPTION service, you have to keep track.

2) It wasn't a $75 point. The point is about the County going to Universal Coverage.

3) What do you think the point of having a SUBSCRIPTION Fire Service is?

Seems you think its just dandy to have a Subscription Fire service, but instead of paying up front, only pay if you need the service.

BUT, there aren't nearly enough actual calls to Fund the Service that way.
In your world, the Fire Service would end up being cancelled for everybody because you wouldn't get enough money to pay even the first year salaries, let alone the many Millions in equipment and buildings it takes to provide this service.

Arthur

 

That's great, but this isn't about "hating" the Cranicks. Everyone in the community was presumably aware that this was a subscription service...so if the Cranicks didn't like it they did have the option of moving (or at least subscribing). Bear in mind that the Cranicks were presumably paying less in taxes than they would have otherwise, and since they skipped paying the $75, one imagines that they likely were happy with lower taxes rather higher ones. Had they never had a fire, they would not likely have had a death bed epiphany and left money to the struggling fire department...they'd probably felt smugly good about the fact that they got away without paying the fees for years.

There's nothing objectively wrong with the Cranick's skipping the payments if that was their preference, and there's nothing wrong if their kitty-corner neighbor, and others like him, are also pleased with their ability to skip the payment. The problem is that if the Cranicks win this fight, and grant themselves the de facto right to pay after the fact, the right to save money by foregoing payment to the fire department will be lost to everyone.

I have no problem with that either, if that is what the majority in the community want...but this change would not be coming from some democratic movement or decision within the community. It's being forced by one family who, in hindsight, wish they had bought a service, and now in an effort to shift the blame and financial responsibility for the fire the Cranicks intentionally lit in the first place onto a fire company that the Cranicks refused to contract with/*, the Cranicks' tragedy seems likely to make buying that service mandatory for everyone.

------------------
/* One reason they might gave decided against entering into the contract, of course, is that they figured the fire company would protect them anyway...in which case, it's only the "chumps" who pay in advance. Rational economic actors would only pay if they needed the service (i.e., if there was a fire) in that case.
------------------


I would love for a reporter to ask the Cranicks the question: So when you decided not to pay the $75 fee to the fire department, what the Hell did you imagine would happen if there was a fire?

 

Nothing dense about it. When a police department responds to reports of gunshots being fired, they don't know the residency status of the people shooting or being shot at. But at least the shots are being fired within their jurisdiction.

This fire apparently didn't happen within the fire department's normal jurisdiction, which is why a fee was charged to rural residents.

Butt-hurt much that you're losing this argument?

 

Bet they won't try that shit again.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

By offering service to their neighbors, the area was with in the service zone of the city. If the city on the other hand limited its response area to the city boundaries you would be correct. But that is not the case here.

 

Who is stopping Libertarians from setting up their own communities? Personally, I think it is a great idea. Then they could live and learn the follies of their philosophy first hand. But then those same folks should not come crying to me when their house burns down.