One of the arguments that used to appear regularly whenever anyone proposed privatizing public services is that “in the bad old days”, when fire departments were run by insurance firms, they’d only put out fires that endangered paying customers. Apparently that sort of thing still happens today:
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.
Terrible, isn’t it? A strong refutation to that whole crazy libertarian notion of privatizing essential services. So which greedy corporation runs the fire service?
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.
Interesting.
H/T to BoingBoing, where many of the comments seem to be from folks who didn’t read that it wasn’t a private fire service.
Yes, initially private fire companies didn’t put out non-customers fires, but remember who financed the brigades, it was the insurance companies. It didn’t take long to figure out that if your client’s neighbour’s house was on fire, your client’s house might catch on fire too. This did create a classic free rider problem, but the insurance companies didn’t go broke. The rich, those with the most to lose, would pay for coverage and poorer people would free ride. That’s how modern government works too, the rich subsidize the poor. For those areas where private coverage didn’t exist, there was the volunteer fire brigade. Some towns – including early Toronto – made it mandatory for everyone to have fire buckets in their homes, so they could assist their neighbours.
Comment by Publius — October 5, 2010 @ 08:45
I wonder what they would have done if there was somebody trapped in the house.
Assume, for the purposes of this thought experiment, that the trapped person is not a climate naysayer who, you know, deserves to burn.
Comment by Lickmuffin — October 5, 2010 @ 10:26
I thought this only happened in the bad old days « Quotulatiousness…
I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog :)…
Trackback by World Wide News Flash — October 5, 2010 @ 10:03
Although this is all quite true, it’s not what the average reader seems to be picking up from the story: the take-away seems to be that this situation could only happen if the fire service isn’t public . . . even though this fire department is public.
Comment by Nicholas — October 5, 2010 @ 12:49
One certainly hopes that they at least verified that there was nobody in the house . . . anything less than that would surely qualify as at least manslaughter, wouldn’t it?
Comment by Nicholas — October 5, 2010 @ 12:51
[…] story about the fire department letting the house burn down has been used to “prove” that it’s a case of market failure and that free markets […]
Pingback by Follow up: burning the free market for government failure « Quotulatiousness — October 6, 2010 @ 17:07