Fire sale: Fire Department lets home burn over $75.00 fee.

I gave a quick scan of the 2 sites you list, and I cant find anything about this one way or another.
So either I missed them or they arent there.
I will wait for you to post the exact link.

I have Yahoo as my start page, MM. They have the story with lots of links.
www.yahoo.com
Maybe that will help.

"I hadn't paid my $75 and that's what they want, $75, and they don't care how much it burned down," Gene Cranick told WPSD, an NBC affiliate in Kentucky. "I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong."

I would add that this is the way fire departments used to be run -- as private services available only to subscribers -- and the way some libertarians would like to see such services run in the future.

The problem is much easier solved by levying a large fine/fee for servicing the fire. Allowing the fire to burn the house down represented a needless loss of capital for the homeowner and damages the property values of the houses around it.

They could have charged the guy 5 grand - the equivalent of almost 70 homeowners paying the fee - and the guy would have paid it, happily, to avoid having his house burned down. It would represent a win-win for everyone. But instead, by sticking with an ideological point, it's a lose-lose for everyone.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

The problem is much easier solved by levying a large fine/fee for servicing the fire. Allowing the fire to burn the house down represented a needless loss of capital for the homeowner and damages the property values of the houses around it.

They could have charged the guy 5 grand - the equivalent of almost 70 homeowners paying the fee - and the guy would have paid it, happily, to avoid having his house burned down. It would represent a win-win for everyone. But instead, by sticking with an ideological point, it's a lose-lose for everyone.

As engineer pointed out before, there are costs associated with maintaining a fire department. Those costs have to be paid whether there's a fire or not. Paying for the fire department, then, on an as-needed basis just doesn't work.

There would be no money, for instance, to pay start-up costs. Just like insurance, a service like this depends on people paying for it who don't need it. So if you can't solve the free rider problem, then you end up with no fire department at all. What you're suggesting, then, isn't win-win, it's lose-lose: no fire department at all for anyone, whether they're willing to pay for it or not.

They could have charged the guy 5 grand - the equivalent of almost 70 homeowners paying the fee - and the guy would have paid it, happily, to avoid having his house burned down. It would represent a win-win for everyone. But instead, by sticking with an ideological point, it's a lose-lose for everyone.

Quote:

They could have charged the guy 5 grand - the equivalent of almost 70 homeowners paying the fee - and the guy would have paid it, happily, to avoid having his house burned down. It would represent a win-win for everyone. But instead, by sticking with an ideological point, it's a lose-lose for everyone.

It's easy for you to say that he would have happily paid a high fee, but that doesn't make it so. Collecting that high fee would have fallen to the community with the FD and, chances are, he wouldn't have paid.

Quote:

They could have charged the guy 5 grand - the equivalent of almost 70 homeowners paying the fee - and the guy would have paid it, happily, to avoid having his house burned down. It would represent a win-win for everyone. But instead, by sticking with an ideological point, it's a lose-lose for everyone.

It's easy for you to say that he would have happily paid a high fee, but that doesn't make it so. Collecting that high fee would have fallen to the community with the FD and, chances are, he wouldn't have paid.

This is immaterial to this question, because it is plainly obvious that enough people ARE paying the start-up costs for the department to work: after all, they did send out trucks and men, it isn't as if they didn't have the guys to do it. You posit a situation which doesn't match the reality.

Proposing a levyed fine which is large enough deters people from 'forgetting' to pay while at the same time ensuring that there is no absolutely ******* useless loss of property for no reason other than to service a stupid ideological position.

Try making the same argument without Appealing to Extremes. I didn't suggest that EVERYONE pay for fire service on a per-incident basis; only that a remedy could be found to help those who didn't pay, instead of hurting the entire community by just letting things burn down.

Allowing the house to burn down over a $75 dollar fee is criminal in it's stupidity. Truly asinine, and I'm surprised to see you support such an obviously foolish choice. The fire department wasn't beholden by law to help these people, but they should have, because it's the right thing to do - period.

But the county only had a fire service because there was no option for paying for fire services on an as-needed basis.

Under that system, most people would simply take a chance that they wouldn't have to pay at all.

The reasonable person, therefore, would simply invest the $5K on the expectation that the proceeds would probably be more than the $75 annual fee that other suckers would pay.

I'm not appealing to extremes, I'm just using some common sense and elementary game theory.

I certainly would have no objection to the fire department helping Mr. Crainick out of the goodness of their collective hearts, but if folks want to put government on a cash basis, then this is the kind of result that they have to expect. I'm not in favor of having fire departments sit around and watch people's houses burn down, but then I'm not in favor of financing services like fire departments on a voluntary basis either.

Insurance companies don't treat patients, doctors and nurses do. Insurance companies pay doctors and hospitals.

The fire department does have an ethical obligation here, and if fulfilling their ethical obligation despite the lack of payment encourages others under this system to stop paying, then the point should be that the current system doesn't work.

While you have a point that the FD is offering a service to residents that otherwise would have it, the fact that they otherwise wouldn't have it is worth critical address. The idea that this kind of service is in any way optional is present in the policies of the area, and in the homeowner's choice.

No doubt he would be having second thoughts about that now, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.