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> A man in the suburban South watched a chimney fire burn his house to the ground as he waited for the fire department, which billed him anyway and then sued hi

• pmx 10y ago
  There has to be more to this story.. can't be that simple can it? ?
  • illumin8 10y ago
    This is a well reported story. Federal law only requires towns to provide a basic education to K-12 students. Anything beyond that like police, fire, and ambulance service, is not mandatory. If you choose to live in such a place, be prepared to be completely self sufficient.
• illumin8 10y ago
  It's a good question, but many of these rural southern towns are very poor, and governed by conservative ideologues that have privatized all non-mandatory services. These towns are required by federal law to provide school service to children within them, however, anything else like police, fire, and ambulance services are not required. I think it's truly a shame that this has led to predatory practices by private companies who charge "fire insurance" rates of $500 a year, and charge exorbitant rates to people who might innocently dial 911 while their house is burning and don't have insurance. For what it's worth, this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts), but if you get far enough into the poor rural southern states, it really is like a 3rd world country.
  • weisser 10y ago
    > this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts) Much of the interior of the US could be described as civilized...
    • freditup 10y ago
      Sexism, racism, homophobia, jingoism, etc are all considered unacceptable and politically-incorrect, but for some reason condescension and unjustified attacks are A-okay when it comes to certain regions of the US. I don't really understand this, although my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority.
      • arcanus 10y ago
        > my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority As well as good old fashioned, 'fear of people with different values and culture than your own'
        • refurb 10y ago
          Reminds me of a guy I knew in San Francisco. He was talking to a friend of mine who grew up in Georgia and was Indian (South Asian). He starts off with "Wow! That must have be tough growing up as an Indian in Georgia! Those guys are so backward." My friend replies "Actually, I had a great childhood. Never had any problems being Indian. Georgia is a great place to grow up." Of course the guy from SF had never actually been to Georgia.
          • gozur88 10y ago
            That's pretty normal. I hear people who've never been south of the Mason-Dixon bashing the South on a regular basis. They get all their information from coastal journalists. Who've never been there either. These are the same people who would bristle if you said something bad about people in another country and say "How do you know? You can't understand a place by reading about it in the newspaper."
      • hangsi 10y ago
        I think it has less to do with superiority than many people believe. Consider the gist of this idea I made up now: If a person is considering ideas (especially political ideas) then they might view those ideas as being held by a person like themself. Some ideas are very easy to picture being held by a very similar person (e.g. spicy food), but the more complex the idea (e.g. Trexit) the more difficult it becomes to conceive of the mindset that the similar person would need to have in order to have reached the differing conclusion. The key here is that it's not really about a differing mindset, so much as different circumstances that construct the differing mindset. This, I assert, is very difficult to account for completely without simply accepting all views at face value as both perfectly valid and a complete mystery, unknowable outside each person's mind. As such, it is inconceivable to the person who thinks they understand both the issues at hand and the mind of the relevant populace to reach a conclusion that contradicts the logical consequences of the (broken) assumptions, and thus the conclusion is that the one who holds such opinions is an illogical dunce, and unacceptable in this rational age. In actuality the assumptions are broken in a subtle way such that it is easy to miss the leap made to broad-brush painting.
  • louprado 10y ago
    I recall a lecture that proposed the home/fire insurance companies own the fire departments and your policy includes fire department services. In theory it should ensure incentives are aligned but then there is the issue of logistics and scale.
    • gozur88 10y ago
      It might not work out as well as you'd expect. Insurance companies are going to run the numbers, and if they make the most money by covering only 95% of the houses and then just paying out the last 5% that's what they'll do.
      • winstonewert 10y ago
        Is that bad? If it costs the insurance company more to stop the fire then to replace my house, the rational action to take is to let the house burn.
        • HarryHirsch 10y ago
          You'd be a ward of the state because your largest asset just burned down. Your neighbours might object because they have to foot your welfare now.
          • gozur88 10y ago
            The scenario is the insurance company pays to replace your lost items because it's cheaper to pay out than provide fire service. So that's not an issue.
            • jimmaswell 10y ago
              Money doesn't replace one of a kind items or data on storage.
        • gozur88 10y ago
          I think it is bad, for two reasons. One, firemen do more than just put out fires. If there's nobody around to put out your burning house, there's nobody around to pull you out if you've been overcome by smoke inhalation. Two, people tend to accumulate objects of sentimental value. Your great grandfather's watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFtHjV4c4uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFtHjV4c4uw) might be priceless to you and only worth $50 to an insurance company.
  • TruthAndDare 10y ago
    > predatory practices by private companies It does sound awful not to have access to fire service to someone like me who is used to it,* but then again, have the company done anything wrong by offering the service? Starting no company at all and offering no service at all would have been acceptable, right? I mean, that's what most of us do. Then, is there really anything wrong with offering people a service, even at a high price, if you don't take away any alternative they already had (which in this case would be to let the house burn)? * I haven't actually ever used the service, but I count on that they will come if I call. I count on the fire department coming more than I do the police, because if there's a fire, other people's stuff and lives are on the line. When it's just about me, I'm not as sure that I am considered worth the cost. For the record, I'm in Europe.
    • andrepd 10y ago
      That's a very simplistic way to do things. If there were no private firefighters then it wouldn't take long for there to be enough public pressure for a firefighting force to be financed by the state. Because these predatory companies are already in place, the government won't bother and will just shrug. So the alternative to private firefighters isn't no firefighters.
      • TruthAndDare 10y ago
        That would mean that the rest of the people (i.e. not the fire fighting company) aren't rational. I'm not sure we can put the responsibility on a company to behave so as to save everyone else from their irrationality.
      • dexterdog 10y ago
        But does the public version cost less than the private one. I would be shocked if it did.
        • Klinky 10y ago
          You'd have to analyze it on a case-by-case basis. The hope would be that public programs have less of a profit incentive to gouge people. That said, public programs are often bloated. However, that bloat often comes from contracting out to private entities with connections. Going pure private, profit motives may cause an entity to strive for efficiency, or it could make them strive to have a monopoly stranglehold on a market and gouge customers as much as possible.
• gozur88 10y ago
  Depends on where you live. In some areas you pay for something akin to fire insurance - a yearly fee that covers fire service. You don't have to pay, but the fire department isn't under any obligation to help you if you don't. And if you engage their services on an as-needed basis it's going to be very expensive.
  • jimmaswell 10y ago
    Someone shouldn't be able to opt out of fire insurance - a fire can start more fires and have other repercuasions beyond the owner's property
    • gozur88 10y ago
      I think they still come and put the fire out. They just bill you for it.
    • jschwartzi 10y ago
      In that case it's called a property tax.
• Lazare 10y ago
  A "public good" is, technically speaking, one which is "non-excludable and non-rivalrous". In a dense urban area, firefighting is clearly a public good, because to stop the building owned by Paying Client A burning down, you need to stop the building next door owned by Non-Paying Client B burning. You can't just stand around and make sure it doesn't spread across the property line to paying clients. Or to flip it around, paying firefighters to fight your fire benefits everyone around you. In non-urban areas, at least if there's no serious risk of wildfires, firefighting is clearly not a public good. If your farmhouse start to burn, it's not going to threaten anyone but you, and paying firefighters to save it doesn't benefit anyone but you. And in a (rare?) case of economic theory working in practice too, that's what we often observe: Rural fire departments often require fees to be paid, and won't fight fires if you haven't paid up. (That being said: Just because rural firefighting isn't a public good doesn't mean it shouldn't be communally funded out of general taxation. Lots of what governments spend their money on aren't actual public goods.)
• mnarayan01 10y ago
  > Is one typically billed when you have the fire department arrive? I thought it was a public good. It's complicated. Unincorporated areas will often (depending on the state) leave firefighting to nearby municipalities, which will generally charge a periodic fee for coverage and bill property owners who do not pay the fee if/when they respond. Even some municipal corporations (e.g. towns, etc) do the same thing, though generally only in quite rural areas. My impression is that it's generally pragmatic rather than ideological: most of us live in densely populated areas, but (in the US), most space is very sparsely populated.
• dredmorbius 10y ago
  There's the historical lesson of the fire brigade of Cassius: http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/a/crassus.htm http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/a/crassus.htm Crassus won a reputation for himself as a soldier in Sulla's campaigns in Italy (83), but fell out of favour because of his excessive greed in purchasing estates at knock-down prices during Sulla's proscriptions of his political opponents. Another source of his wealth was buying up property at risk from fire very cheaply and only then putting his private fire brigade into action. Other sources of his wealth were mines, and his business buying slaves, training them, and then re-selling them. In these ways he came to own most of Rome and increased his fortune from 300 talents to 7100 talents. (A talent of silver is approximately 32kg, worth about 9 years of labour, so 7,100 talents would represent some 63,000 years of labour income. Very rough modern equivalent, about $2 billion, based on labour.)
• rwallace 10y ago
  I'm surprised nobody is mentioning the elephant at the dining table here. A 15k bill for saving your house is arguably fair. But in this case, there was a 15k bill for not saving the man's house. What form of corruption has brought about a legal system that enforces bills when the service was not provided?
• a3n 10y ago
  As the article implied, a lot of people think so. But it varies.