{"id":5676,"date":"2010-10-05T07:49:23","date_gmt":"2010-10-05T11:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=5676"},"modified":"2010-10-05T07:49:23","modified_gmt":"2010-10-05T11:49:23","slug":"i-thought-this-only-happened-in-the-bad-old-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/10\/05\/i-thought-this-only-happened-in-the-bad-old-days\/","title":{"rendered":"I thought this only happened in the bad old days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the arguments that used to appear regularly whenever anyone proposed privatizing public services is that &#8220;in the bad old days&#8221;, when fire departments were run by insurance firms, they&#8217;d only put out fires that endangered paying customers. Apparently that sort of thing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wpsdlocal6.com\/news\/local\/Firefighters-watch-as-home-burns-to-the-ground-104052668.html\" target=\"_blank\">still happens today<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won&#8217;t respond, then watches it burn. That&#8217;s exactly what happened to a local family tonight.<\/p>\n<p>A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t do anything to stop his house from burning.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Terrible, isn&#8217;t it? A strong refutation to that whole crazy libertarian notion of privatizing essential services. So which greedy corporation runs the fire service?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The mayor said if homeowners don&#8217;t pay, they&#8217;re out of luck.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Interesting.<\/p>\n<p>H\/T to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2010\/10\/04\/firefighters-watch-a.html\" target=\"_blank\">BoingBoing<\/a>, where many of the comments seem to be from folks who didn&#8217;t read that it wasn&#8217;t a private fire service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the arguments that used to appear regularly whenever anyone proposed privatizing public services is that &#8220;in the bad old days&#8221;, when fire departments were run by insurance firms, they&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,10,53,13],"tags":[52,121,394],"class_list":["post-5676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-liberty","category-politics","category-usa","tag-absurd","tag-insurance","tag-privatization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1ty","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5676"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5678,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5676\/revisions\/5678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}