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What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily
- mahmud 16y agoHere is a video of Tennessee fire-fighters watching a house burn to the ground because the owner didn't pre-pay the annual fee. http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/04/county-firefighters-subscription/ http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/04/county-firefighters-subs...
- wccrawford 16y agoThey weren't 'watching it burn'. They were protecting the neighboring houses. The ones that -had- paid to support the fire department.
- mahmud 16y agoThe firefighting fee was $75. Wouldn't it have been more "economical" to accept what he offered to pay, on the spot, and save the man's house? Instead of teaching him a lesson? He was willing to pay thousands. I mean, I am all for free market, but libertarians are pushing the limits of common sense just to maintain intellectual consistency. Isn't there a room for "late fee", or "environmental damage", or just good ole "bad PR" in their model?
- gaius 16y agoNo the insurance was $75. See the difference? Everyone's small fee upfront is what purchased all the equipment. If you wait 'til after, then you've got nothing when you need it. And a man who won't pay up $75, will he pay thousands once you've already put the fire out?
- mahmud 16y agoIt's not just about a single non-paying member. It's unfair to the paying houses around him to have a charred building next to theirs. It would depreciate their property values worse than anything. Not to mention the unsightly view, odors and mess. Since they're able to constitute these drastic "watch it burn" policies by fiat, why not have a policy entitling the fire department to your car, luxury items, a portion of your income or some of your property if and only if they save your house when you're without policy? If you have seen drunks and problem gamblers, you would know that not all people are equally responsible. It would be better for society, as a whole, if fees were taken from them in small portions, and put to service when and where they're needed.
- Semiapies 16y agoWhat "fiat"? Aren't these city governments with city councils, elections, and the other trappings of the democratic process?
- mahmud 16y agoThe law might have been on paper, but the public reaction there, and that of the media, has been one of shock. I have looked into the subject when it arose a few days ago, and this particular policy was one made without public involvement. The entire leadership, every seat in that town was held by GOP members; they cooked up this policy in an attempt to live up to their own idealized expectation of a tax-less government. Serves the American public right though. They're well versed in toy, divisive issues of "morality", but they're ignorant of laws that affect their lives everyday.
- Semiapies 16y agoSo, clear this up for me - is this a secret plan made without public involvement, or is this due to public ignorance and disinterest in the subject, despite the people outside the city being offered the fee every year and the guy in question knowing that he hadn't paid the fee? And what responsibility do the 300 million members of the "American public" have to know the firefighting policies of some county in Tennessee?
- mahmud 16y agoRealistically, a legal measure can be considered a popular choice, even democratic, if it was put forth in a ballot, or if the law makers and politicians that proposed it have argued for it in public fora. What we have here is a crew of GOP politicians who came to power on biblical and national issues; having been financed and propped up by their regional and state offices. The people there, like most everywhere else in the U.S., vote in lock step with their "traditional" parties, for/against issues than don't relate to them on a daily basis. People will happily vote against their own self-interest because they're under-informed, and held emotionally captive by politicians who invoke moral and religious argument to further their agenda. Did these people choose to have a dysfunctional fire department? No. They chose less taxes, and smaller government. The GOP, instead of thinking of what's best for the people, decided to stick by their philosophical guns and deprived people of functioning infrastructure. I will grant you that specific house was outside their taxed jurisdiction. But then comes the next argument: why hasn't the state stepped forward to help its remote citizens? Why hasn't the state of Tennessee dictated a policy of full, state-wide coverage for fire and rescue services for people in remote areas? What's philosophically unacceptable about a state dictating to its cities and towns that they need to support those satellite households? If not, why hasn't the state collected fees from those households to insure them? Get my drift? When a gang of politicians has free reign to act out its wildest political fantasies and govern by its most idealized rules, well, shit tends to happen. This is what I meant by "maintaining intellectual consistency". It wouldn't harm ONE TN politician to tax people in remote areas, not ONE. But they chose not to.
- Semiapies 16y agoAn excellent question, as a practical manner. Mind, there are ways people can be compelled to pay, within various limits. Some search-and-rescue services (I believe in Norway, for one set of examples) have a nominal, voluntary fee that hikers and skiers can opt to pay or not. If payers need rescue, they don't have to pay anything beyond that original fee. If non-payers get rescued, they get a big bill for search helicopter fuel, labor, etc. spent in looking for them. Something like that seems sensible to me - if the guy had said, "Yes, please put out my house, I'm aware you'll bill me,", maybe signing a waiver or whatever to prevent problems with the firefighters' insurance company, then the firefighters could try to save his house and then the city could bill him, then sue him or garnish his wages, etc. if he refused to pay.
- alextgordon 16y agoAnd a man who won't pay up $75, will he pay thousands once you've already put the fire out? Even the american healthcare system people lets people pay for treatment if they don't have insurance. After the fact. This is what the courts exist for. Not allowing someone to pay because there's a possibility they might default is completely ridiculous. Should we close all the restaurants now, too?
- Semiapies 16y agoIt's not "not allowing someone to pay". It's "not providing service to someone out of a hurried promise of later payment". What restaurant will kindly let you pay them next Tuesday for a hamburger today? And sadly, no - if you're a homeless person and walk into most hospitals with cancer, you'll get some painkillers if you need them (before being sent on your way), not a walk to the oncology ward.
- anigbrowl 16y agoYes, so when his house catches on fire and you can put it out, you hand him a bill for $5000 or whatever the cost of a fire crew for several hours is. And if he doesn't pay, you sue him. You get the cost of providing the service back, he still has a house. Allowing the dwelling to burn to the ground just results in a destruction of wealth for zero gain.
- Zaak 16y agoThis is the heart of the matter. The firefighters were within their rights to refuse to let him buy their services, but it would have been better for everyone involved if they had put out the fire, then billed him for the cost.
- anamax 16y ago> Yes, so when his house catches on fire and you can put it out, you hand him a bill for $5000 or whatever the cost of a fire crew for several hours is. That policy means that you can't afford to have a fire crew. The marginal cost associated with putting out fires is a small fraction of the cost of having a fire department. > And if he doesn't pay, you sue him. And you lose because contracts under duress are unenforceable.
- anigbrowl 16y agoWell, obviously I can afford it because it's a small marginal cost; waiting for him to cough up the required sum is quite bearable. And you lose because contracts under duress are unenforceable. It's not so simple. Duress is where someone forces another into a bad position, eg by setting the house on fire first. A contract made under necessity (where the house is already on fire) will probably stand, unless it's for some wildly disproportional amount. But in any case, a contract is not always required. In cases where one party knowingly accepts the beneficial services of another, they can be billed for it as if a contract existed.
- hagy 16y agoDuress is where someone forces another into a bad position, eg by setting the house on fire first. Duress only implies impaired judgment of the contract signer as due to immediate fear; it doesn’t imply the other party created the situation. Any lawyer would easily argue that the fire department charged an irrationally high cost for fire fighting that the home owner wouldn’t have agreed to had they had time to fully weight the cost and benefits of fire fighting services. In the worst case, one only need say they planned to demolish the house in the near future and therefore paying to have the fire extinguished was irrational. A contract for non-insurance, pay-for-use fire fighting would only be enforceable if signed before the fact.
- Semiapies 16y agoWhat, exactly, does the "free market" or "intellectual consistency" have to do with the firefighting policy of the governments of that city or the Alaskan city?
- jrmurad 16y agoLibertarians and the free market? Isn't this story about a government-run fire department?
- tptacek 16y agoNo, it's a story about a municipal fire department that had a business relationship with surrounding unincorporated communities.
- Semiapies 16y agoAren't both these points true?
- tptacek 16y agoNo, because the fire department in question had nothing to do with the government that represented these homeowners, just as the fire department of Rockford, IL has nothing to do with Oak Park.
- Semiapies 16y agoHow does that make false the fact that the municipal fire department is run by a city? Government agencies at local and state levels make arrangements like this all the time without somehow ceasing to be run by the relevant government. How are "libertarians" and the "free market" involved?
- tptacek 16y agoThey aren't involved, except to the extent that the South Fulton PD made the mistake of offering market-based coverage to residents of surrounding areas when they should have just kept to their own city.
- Semiapies 16y agoIncidentally, why exactly do you imagine libertarians are involved in this?
- anamax 16y ago> He was willing to pay thousands. Any agreement to pay while his house is burning is unenforceable. I've been in a similar position. Once the emergency was over, the person decided that it really wasn't worth what he agreed at the time.
- Nogwater 16y agoThis thinking would only work in places where fire can't jump very far AND a very high percentage of people have paid. Living in Southern California with Santa Ana winds (warm, dry, and often over 50 mph) this would never work. The fire fighters can't just spray down the neighbor's houses because sparks can jump too far. A similar problem would occur if only 50% of people paid. Too many houses would burn for a reasonably sized fire department to protect the homes of the people who had paid.
- Semiapies 16y agoTo be fair, in big chunks of SoCal, it barely helps to aggressively fight every burning house. The pains of building houses on hills in an ecosystem centered around regular forest fires. :/
- eru 16y agoHow about building houses made of stone?
- Semiapies 16y agoEven stone and brick houses have flammable components. Even a completely non-flammable concrete bunker would have survivability issues with ventilation and temperature if surrounded by a forest fire for any significant length of time.
- eru 16y agoYes. Though it probably does make a difference, does it?
- Nogwater 16y agoFair enough. Still, fires do occasionally make it into the cities (I'm pretty sure I remember seeing one eat a neighborhood in San Bernardino a few years ago).
- Semiapies 16y agoA difference in detail here is that that fire was outside the city. Residents of that city don't opt-in, they just pay taxes to support firefighting services. There's no county-wide firefighting service in that area, so the city provides optional service to county residents whom the city can't levy taxes on - if they pay that fee.
- wccrawford 16y ago"But it had to be done. Because if people knew that the firemen would save them free of charge, then nobody would pay. And if people knew that you could avoid paying the firemen up until the moment that first spark hit your curtain, well, again, nobody would pay." Exactly. Nobody wants someone stranger's house to burn down, but part of the rules of living there was that you'd pay your portion if you wanted protection. On another site, I saw someone write a comment like "When my house was robbed, the insurance companies just stood there and did nothing! I offered to pay them afterwards, but they wouldn't agree!" (Obvious sarcasm.) Insurance doesn't work if you only pay it -after- you have a problem.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- enjo 16y agoOf course when my house was robbed the insurance companies went out of their way to avoid paying for...well.. anything. We had about $5000 in property stolen. We ended up getting a check for $2200 ($1000 deductible). We had visual evidence for everything expensive. It was the little things, like fighting with them over whether or not those diamond earrings were actually diamonds. They turned the thing into a war of attrition. They figure that if they fight everything, you'll pick and choose your battles. Ultimately, saving them a lot of money. They were right. Life's to short to bicker with those jag-offs.
- TheAmazingIdiot 16y agoThen try watching the interview with the victim on MSNBC. They can waive the fees, as they have done before. And both him and his neighbor said "we'll pay however much you say". Their responser: burn it to the ground.
- tptacek 16y agoWhat's your point? The (fire) victim chose to live in an area that had no fire department; when offered fire coverage at an extremely nominal fee (two cups of coffee a month!), they opted out. About the most you could change in this scenario would have been for the FD not to have offered the service to residents outside their area, which would have made everybody worse off.
- GiraffeNecktie 16y agoThis is what it's like to live in a place where "taxation" is a dirty four letter word. Call me a commie, but I'm glad I live in a place where public safety, road maintenance and health care are a shared civic responsibility. Everyone who can afford to pays and everyone benefits.
- tsotha 16y agoOr you could just pay the fee and pretend it's a tax.
- gaius 16y agoWhat happens if you don't pay your taxes? You don't need to wait for an accident that may never happen like the house catching fire, armed men will shortly arrive on your doorstep demanding that you do. Just saying that there are two sides to every coin.
- gloob 16y agoChaps with guns inconveniencing you is a risk anywhere with law enforcement. Or without it, for that matter. Taxes aren't the root cause of it.
- Semiapies 16y agoWhere did he say it was the "root cause" and not a consequence of not paying taxes versus not paying a voluntary fee?
- GiraffeNecktie 16y agoWhat happens if I don't pay my taxes? Lots of annoying letters and then, eventually, maybe a court order plus fines etc. They don't demand money at gunpoint. And they'll still send the firetrucks if my house is on fire. We're a little more civilized than that. One of the reasons for universal fire service is to avoid the harm that comes when people try to do it on their own. You don't want random people - the homeowners, their kids or passersby - jumping in to fight a fire without the proper training, backup, and equipment.
- Udo 16y agoI know I'm probably the only one thinking like this, but I find this whole concept - starting from "voluntary" payment right through to "watching their houses burn so they can learn their lesson" - incredibly perverse and morally bankrupt to the extreme. If your neighbor's house is on fire, you don't haggle over the price of the garden hose. If you're a firefighter equipped to deal with disaster, you do your damn best to do your fucking job whenever the opportunity presents itself. It would actually be less cruel if there was no local fire brigade at all. What kind of asshole do you have to be if you can just sit there watching a family's home burn down while doing nothing but make pompous remarks?
- gaius 16y agoIf you're a firefighter equipped to deal with disaster, you do your damn best to do your fucking job whenever the opportunity presents itself It's easy to call on other people to risk life and limb. 'Cos it's their "job" right? Which they volunteered to do for the benefit of the community, of which this person had voluntarily opted out by not paying his fair share. Remember community implies obligations as well as benefits.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nodata 16y agoWell one alternative might be to apologise to the fire-fighters, and agree to pay them a lot of money - way over the missed premiums - to put the fire out. This would help you, because you would otherwise lose way more money instead, and it would help them, because they could sidestep the claim that "if everybody did this...". You could even say that upfront payers get priority over one-off payers.
- rythie 16y agoWhat's your view of way over the missed premiums? 10x, 100x? (Assuming 1/100 chance over 20 years - which is very high) $75 over 20 years is $1500 So they are looking at committing $15,000 or even $150,000 if their house burns down. Now, bare in mind this person wouldn't even pay $75 so how are you going to get even $15k off them let alone $150k
- kznewman 16y agoThe solution of including the cost of fire fighting in the cost of owning the house itself helps fix what I see as the mistake in thinking that I don't benefit from having my neighbors house fire put out. If volunteer fire fighters are told by the people who they protect that it is ok to watch a house burn (because necessary costs were not covered somehow) then philosophically what is to stop them from not helping when I don't slip them extra money because their labor is volunteer anyway? I think this eats at the soul of the community.
- gaius 16y agoThese guys volunteered for a job that might involve getting burnt alive. So I think their value-system likely precludes corruption of that sort.
- anigbrowl 16y agoThat'd be nice, but sadly it's not the world we live in. Arson committed by firefighters is a small but expensive problem for the people who run fire departments. http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/tr-141.pdf http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/tr-141.pd... Doctors are supposed to be moral paragons too, but every so often one is revealed to be abusing their trust in some horrific fashion.
- kznewman 16y agoMy point was not meant to imply they would accept bribes. They do the job to fight fires so why agree with the idea that we should stop them when some equipment was not yet fully amortized? If they accept bribes or not, the idea you stop volunteers from doing what they want (fight fires) is wrong.
- DanielStraight 16y agoThis ignores the option of putting out the fire and charging more than the fee would ever have been over the life of the house. Pay the fee each year and we'll put out your house for free. Don't pay the fee, and we'll still put out your house if you want us to, but we'll charge 200 years worth of fees.
- zacharycohn 16y agoThen the issue of determining what the fee has to be, making people pay, keeping track of everyone who is paying the fee vs everyone who is paying the insurance, etc. Which, especially for a volunteer organization, seems like a lot more work than just keeping track of who paid insurance this month and who didn't.
- frankus 16y agoExactly. The $75 is an insurance fee, not a club membership. If I shoot myself in the leg and go to the hospital uninsured, they fix me up and then bill me for the cost. They don't let me bleed to death to "teach others a lesson." We can't have people buying insurance whenever they need it, but it's perfectly OK to have people buy the service that the insurance pays for directly when they need it.
- anamax 16y ago> This ignores the option of putting out the fire and charging more than the fee would ever have been over the life of the house. You're assuming that they could collect. They can't. > Don't pay the fee, and we'll still put out your house if you want us to, but we'll charge 200 years worth of fees. He can ignore that bill because he didn't agree to those terms.
- pseudonym 16y agoI know that people are still up in arms over the Alabama/Tennessee/wherever firefighters that sat and let a house burn because of this, but I honestly don't see a problem with this. For most places, firefighting is a part of taxation. These people have $75 less in taxes, and $75 more as a "optional" insurance policy. And to all the people saying "Well pay them when they show up", do you drive around without insurance until you crash, and then go to an insurance company with your monthly payment in hand and say "Pretend I've been paying this all along, now go fix my car"? Do you skimp on health insurance payments until you're in the hospital and expect to only have to pay the cost of a month's worth of health insurance? I'm really not seeing why there's such a disconnect here. And yet, these are the same people that have a problem with the "omg terrible communist" idea of a national health care system. Sheesh.
- turtle4 16y agoYeah, tend to agree with this. In addition to the insurance comparison, which is apt, there is the danger aspect to consider as well. If insuring your house isn't worth less than $7 a month to you, why the hell should the firefighter consider it worth their life (potentially)?
- protomyth 16y agoSuppose they did help and one of the firefighters got hurt. It would probably be a violation of their insurance ("Why were you protecting a home not on your coverage list?"). Would the family who was too cheap to pay $75 a year pay for medical costs for that firefighter?
- anigbrowl 16y agoMost unlikely. The insuredness or not of a property has little bearing on the dangers it poses compared to any other burning building; it's the accountant who'd be upset, rather than the insurers.
- protomyth 16y agoWhen buying insurance for providing a service (especially a dangerous one), there are often conditions about the place these services may be performed and under what condition. It is pretty likely that their insurance policy will only cover them on homes that they are paid to protect. It might also be the case that a certain percentage of each yearly payment goes to insurance.
- anigbrowl 16y agoIndeed, but the judgment call about whether a fire can safely be fought would rest with the experts - firefighters. If I own a very poorly maintained property but my $75, they may be obliged to turn up but I can't force the firefighters to enter an obvious firetrap just because I have a receipt for my payment. They'll do the best they can under the circumstances. The payment or non-payment of a premium tells you nothing about the safety risk of fighting a fire in any given building. Look at some worker's comp policies and you'll find the conditions revolve around the activity performed rather than exactly where that occurred. Otherwise you'd need to assess the financial risk for all possible firefighting scenarios in advance. Here's an example application for insurance for a volunteer fire department (I can't give you a contract offhand because they're unique to each FD). The insurance company does ask what you claim, but this is in order to calculate what the premium should be. Note that this draws no distinction between whether or not lives are at risk from a given emergency call. If a FD has a policy of responding when that is the case (which they normally would), then the insurance is going to priced to include that anyway. Calls to which a response is purely optional probably make up a tiny fraction of the total, and would have a correspondingly marginal effect on premiums. http://www.phly.com/products/forms/VFireDept/VolunteerFireDepartmentSupplementalApplication.pdf http://www.phly.com/products/forms/VFireDept/VolunteerFireDe...
- edfrtghjkjh 16y agoThe reason this makes sense in Alaska is that a lot of places aren't accessible to the fire service - if your cabin out in the woods with no road burns down the fire service can't get a ladder truck there so why are you paying? This used to be the policy with private fire services in most cities - until somebody realised that the house of a poor person with no insurance burning could start a fire that could destroy the city - so it makes sense to put out that fire, in the same way that it makes sense to give people free vaccinations against TB if they are going to cough next to you on the subway. Interesting that the police are still covered by commie taxes - if the firemen wanted protection they should have paid the annual police tax, or got a better deal from a private security firm, or just bought their own guns.
- tptacek 16y agoThis is coming up because of the Tennessee "firefighters watched it burn over $75" story. But there's backstory to that story. The fire department in question served a nearby town, and had no responsibility for the area where the fire occurred. As a service to people living outside their area, you could pay $75/year to get "out of area" coverage. The people who lost their house did two things to keep them from being covered: they didn't pay the fee, and they chose to live in an area without a fire department. There are many thousands of communities in the US that don't have official fire departments; a large subset of them have no fire service whatsoever. It can't be the responsibility of every other community in their vicinity to provide fire service gratis. I know 'jrockway finds it hard to believe, but I am as liberal as they come. Even I don't think that when you choose to live in East Bumfuzzle, TN that you're automatically entitled to the services of the West Bumfuzzle, TN fire department.
- eru 16y agoYes. (And it's funny how the American's have bent the word liberal to mean something closer to social democrat.)
- Semiapies 16y agoIf only "liberal" meant anything that specific, in practice. "Conservative" and "liberal" are both ridiculously bent terms in the US, reduced to meaning nothing more than "What Republicans want" and "What Democrats want". In practice, these aren't really all that different sets of demands - it's simply the propaganda of the Democrats to construe Republicans as militaristic psuedo-libertarians and the propaganda of the Republicans to construe Democrats as pacifistic psuedo-socialists.
- eru 16y agoYes. Although Social Democracy isn't a very specific terms in countries where it's in active use, either.
- tptacek 16y agoFor what it's worth, I want what Democrats want: a strong public school system with centralized governance, national single-payer health care, legal protection for labor unions (I'm a fan of the 8-hour work day), a progressive tax system to pay for it, and the maximum possible business-friendliness obtainable given those constraints.
- AlexC04 16y agoThere is another option. Cost Per Fire = Fire Department Budget / Number of Fires per year Looking here: http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/fire/budget/budget.htm http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/fire/budget/bu... They've got about 1200 fires a year and a $3M budget Which actually works out to $2500 per fire. So actually, they could charge $2500 to put out the fire and end up at the same place. So why not a tiered system. 1) $75 per year - no charge for fire extinguishing 2) $5000 - per incident cost to extinguish the fire. This can be taken out as a lien against the property for those without the cash to settle up. Perhaps a property owner does not legally have the right to refuse this service. The "original spawn" for this post was an article where a fire department allowed a man's house to burn to the ground. Which killed three dogs and a cat. Allowing three dogs and a cat to die for $2500 doesn't site right with me. In fact it feels downright evil. I'm sure it doesn't sit right with the firefighters. I'd imagine that they actually have quite a bit of "psychic turmoil" and possibly even "POTS" (post traumatic stress) symptoms because of their being forced to allow animals to die. What if it were people? Hopefully hindsight will fix this for the future. Compared to the actual cost of the fire, the actual numbers paid out by the insurance company, and the actual losses, even $10K would be a deal. Maybe if you have fire insurance you shouldn't ALSO have to pay the fire department. Maybe your insurance premiums should cover that (from the article, he does have coverage). What is the price of life? In short: this is a major Eff up by a bean counter. It makes me angry.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sbierwagen 16y agoFlagged. This is a livejournal link, the content of which is a tedious 710 word polemic of no lasting value, zero cited sources and an overabundance of emotionally charged outrage triggers. Not HN material at all.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]