The Story:
OBION COUNTY, Tenn. - Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight. A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground. The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning. Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay. The mayor said if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck. This fire went on for hours because garden hoses just wouldn't put it out. It wasn't until that fire spread to a neighbor's property, that anyone would respond. Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.
First and foremost, once there the firefighters should have put the damn thing out and worried about how to bill Cranick in such a way that others understood they needed to pay the fee in order to utilize the services.
Secondly, the neighbor that did pay... wouldn't the fire have not spread to the neighbors property, the neighbor that did pay, if the fire department had responded to Cranick originally?
If no one in the area had paid, would they have allowed a whole block, a whole neighborhood, a whole city to burn to the ground?
I see arguments to the contrary and admit freely the arguments are grounded in harsh reality and make perfect common sense.
National Review Online has a little back and forth going over this issue, arguing both sides.
NRO (Daniel Foster)
That bolded paragraph is what really gets to me. I have no problem with this kind of opt-in government in principle — especially in rural areas where individual need for government services and available infrastructure vary so widely. But forget the politics: what moral theory allows these firefighters (admittedly acting under orders) to watch this house burn to the ground when 1) they have already responded to the scene; 2) they have the means to stop it ready at hand; 3) they have a reasonable expectation to be compensated for their trouble?
Read it all to get the flavor.
NRO (Kevin Williamson):
Dan, you are 100 percent wrong
The situation is this: The city of South Fulton’s fire department, until a few years ago, would not respond to any fires outside of the city limits — which is to say, the city limited its jurisdiction to the city itself, and to city taxpayers. A reasonable position. Then, a few years ago, a fire broke out in a rural area that was not covered by the city fire department, and the city authorities felt bad about not being able to do anything to help. So they began to offer an opt-in service, for the very reasonable price of $75 a year. Which is to say: They greatly expanded the range of services they offer. The rural homeowners were, collectively, better off, rather than worse off. Before the opt-in program, they had no access to a fire department. Now they do.
And, for their trouble, the South Fulton fire department is being treated as though it has done something wrong, rather than having gone out of its way to make services available to people who did not have them before. The world is full of jerks, freeloaders, and ingrates — and the problems they create for themselves are their own. These free-riders have no more right to South Fulton’s firefighting services than people in Muleshoe, Texas, have to those of NYPD detectives
NRO's Jonah Goldberg asks:
Why isn’t there a happy middle ground? You can pay 75 bucks upfront or, if you wait until your house is on fire, it will cost you, I dunno, $10,000? Lots of things work like this.
Back to NRO's Daniel Foster in response:
Jonah, you know how to hit a guy where it hurts: deploying my precious Burke against me and calling me the dread double C-word. But notice, my argument isn’t about the wisdom of the policy, or of Mr. Cranick for not opting into it. It’s about what to do if you’re the fire chief sitting in front of the burning house. As I said in response to Kevin, we’re not talking from “the original position” here. We’re in medias res:
The South Fulton Fire Department already exists — its fixed costs funded by a combination of tax-dollars from in-city residents and opt-in fees from some county residents. It has already responded to the scene of the fire to protect a fee-payer’s property. There is an enforceable verbal agreement from the Cranicks to pay the full per-fire cost.
Kevin would have us think about Pareto optimality and aggregates here. But we’re not designing the policy from scratch, we’re applying the policy we have to a concrete case in which not just the parameters of the policy, but also our moral intuitions, have to be brought to bear.
Now, maybe the fire was too far gone by the time they responded to the fee-paying neighbor’s call, or it would have been too dangerous, or there is some other similarly compelling prudential reason to let the sucker burn. But if there wasn’t, I ask again. What case can be made for doing nothing?
Out of all the arguments I have seen on this issue, Jonah's makes the most sense.
You charge the $75 opt-in fee and if someone hasn't paid it and needs to utilize the services, then you have a set amount (insert whatever amount) that you charge them.
It makes the point that expanding your services costs and it also allows for firefighters to do their jobs and save a house if that fee hasn't been paid as well.
I have never been one to speak of "moral" obligations, to provide services to people not willing to pay for those services, but there are some cases where you have to ask yourself "what is the right thing to do?"
Standing there, holding a firehose, having the ability to stop someone from losing everything and refusing to do it, just seems wrong.
It is called compassion.
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