Honestly that's the only way I could see something like this working. They provide the service anyway and then bill for the cost. I mean in this case the firefighters showed up anyway... I don't get it at all.

The firefighters showed up in case the next house, which did pay the fee, caught fire. Will I agree in theory, nobody would pay the fee if they only had to after the fire was already put out. And as for your earlier point, who would the taxes go to?

Someone previously mentioned they paid taxes to the city/county and then that entity paid the appropriate municipal provider of services.

Thus the county contracts with the city to provide service to the outlying community. It's pretty common with other services and not crazy in the case of fire fighting services.
And I'd expect a post-service bill to cost more than the pre-service fee, if it were arranged that way. So, now instead of providing a service at a cost you have a homeless couple. How is THAT a better outcome in any way shape or form?

This is ridiculous logic - "for want of sharing 80% of profit, xxxxx is yyyyyyyy."

Where does it end? The American ideal is all about allowing people to make poor decisions - this person is homeless due to their own choice. That choice, in the vast majority of circumstances, would have been "correct" under a strict cost/benefit analysis. They lost the bet. Nobody is refunding me my nest egg when I bet on Kmart, right? It's literally the same thing.

That's fine.

Society makes city taxes important because there is a real risk for a large number of people. You're missing a fundamental difference between the city and the country - one I addressed in my original post, and I think fairly completely.

Contrast it with public safety then? Why should someone who lives in the country subsidize county sheriffs when they're probably never going to need their services? Being in the country vs. the city brings different issues to play but doesn't change the fundamentals behind it. There are reasons why hospitals provide care to anyone who shows up and needs it. Those same reasons behind police and emergency care apply to fire departments. They're emergencies. Their definition means that no one thinks it will happen to them and that it's unlikely for it to happen.

This person's homelessness is now a separate societal burden. His country/state/federal goverment will end up spending how much to help him get back on his feet? It's entirely counter productive. Charging everyone a fee, possibly a lesser fee because it's spread out amongst more people, would make sense for all involved. This doesn't even address what would happen had people been in the house or had minor children been involved.

When lives are at stake, we don't generally allow people to 'bet' on everything working out ok. This isn't stocks and Kmart. And it's silly to compare the two. There's no profit-sharing here.

You don't protect people from every bad decision, but plenty of other areas, city and country, suburban, or otherwise have made fire department service a required inclusion in their county/city/state tax or fee structure. It's not as if this is a crazy concept only promoted by socialists, fascists, hippies or whatever the scare word of the day is.

There's a fundamental difference, however, in two key areas:

1 - Police presence (and hospitals/EMTs, to a separate/different extent) can't easily separate out one citizen's issues from another's. Restated: basically every police issue is a public issue; many rural fire issues are not a public issue.

2 - There are significant changes in the "fundamentals" when you fundamentally alter the concentration of people. Delhi deals with different issues than Denison, IA right?

[quote]This person's homelessness is now a separate societal burden. His country/state/federal goverment will end up spending how much to help him get back on his feet? It's entirely counter productive.[quote]

It might be. You don't know that, though. This person may have booked the $$ saved and can afford to rebuild. You're essentially arguing that a correct assessment of a cost/benefit analysis is the wrong decision - you realize that, right?

None of these points are persuasive - minors? Really?

No, it's not - this is the same as spending the kids' food money on Powerball. There's no law against that, right?

It's not a crazy concept, and in a massive number of situations, I agree it's the correct thing to do. That doesn't mean it's correct across the board, right?

Unless you think popularity of an idea equates to utility?

I think that allowing someone's house to burn down for the lack of a 75 dollar fee is a stupid one. I think allowing people to "opt in" to fire department services is a stupid one. And I think that lives don't come down to cost/benefit analysis answers (which ignores the fact that the guy didn't actually make the "right" analysis nor did his local government.)

Not sure how every police issue is a public issue yet essentially no fire department issue in a rural setting is.


And yes, it's illegal to starve your children. Stupid comparison.

So is not paying the 75 dollar fee in the first place.

Life is about taking responsibility for your own actions.

Never said the guy wasn't stupid. But we don't generally provide public services only to those who pay an opt-in fee. We call people stupid who don't plan for retirement but we don't let them starve. In the society I want to live in, we might call this man stupid for not buying homeowners insurance, but the firefighters would try to save the house because that's what they do.

No one's going to convince me that having an optional fee is a good idea for either the locale or the individual (whether it was this guy or someone whose house didn't burn down) so I'm afraid we're at an impasse. I fail to see how "well it gives him the choice and cost/benefit analysis means he tried and whoops he was wrong so he was dumb" makes any of it make sense.

Well, we may have found our disagreement. Let's try this:

If someone offers you $400 if you win a coinflip, but you lose $100, a cost/benefit analysis says you should always take the flip, right?

And losing doesn't mean you made the wrong decision - it just means you hit the short side.

Obviously, risk of ruin (ROR) issues do factor in, but to pretend that this is a $75 issue is ludicrous. It's a $75/year/house issue - and instead of looking at this from a fanciful viewpoint, let's look at it from a strict economic viewpoint, based upon incentives: there's no incentive to pay the fee (which is MUCH more than $75/incident, again as I pointed out before) if you receive benefits at the end. This is NOT an acknowledgment that you should charge - just that charging forces the behavior you're supporting.

In low-risk scenarios, it makes perfect sense to allow people to "opt in" - in fact, it makes so much sense that governmental organizations like the NFIP do the exact same thing. Societal issues aren't local, they're global.

The very point of law is that your rights end when they infringe upon the rights of another, right? Criminal acts generally have a victim, after all - and rural fires will generally only affect one property. Even in this "extreme" case, it didn't burn down two houses.

But the mechanism that forces them to starve isn't illegal. Parental issues are wholly unrelated - as is your ridiculous assertion that "spreading the cost" is an issue since the $75 should do that already.

Similarly, it's illegal to live under a bridge with your kids, but the things that put you there aren't (and shouldn't be) illegal.

The incentive to pay the fee is not to lose your house or your life to a fire. A rural house is not inherently more flame retardant than an urban one. There are no fire plains like there are flood plains and a coin flip is not in any way comparable unless coming up tails means losing everything you own.

Your coin flip scenario is really more like "spend 75 a year and no matter whether its heads or tails someone will at least make the effort to help you" vs. "lose everything that you own including possibly your life if you flip tails 6 times in a row, but that's really unlikely so you're probably safe, right?" There is no reasonable cost/benefit analysis present.

Economists may try but life does not work like a spreadsheet.

I don't mean to patronize, but . . . you really can't see how differing odds can and should influence public policy? I'm kind of confused here - you're not willing at all to look at the other side here?

Do you own earthquake insurance? If you're anywhere near the Midwest (EDIT: I thought you lived in the region), the risk is minuscule but the risk of ruin is huge. You're apparently arguing that any massive ROR is something people should be forced to mitigate - so should we have mandatory earthquake insurance?

Also, fire is BETTER than flood plains, and not worse, as far as comparison - we all have the SAME fire exposure, minus (essentially) "smoking" or "making fireworks."

I guess I'm just confused why you're so intractable here. (REMOVED PERSONAL COMMENTARY THAT MAY/MAY NOT BE PATRONIZING)

I don't own a house, but I believe that a surprising number of people are covered for earthquakes in the midwest because, you know, we had a 5.0 a few years ago and the New Madrid fault is right here.

When it comes to policy, yes, these things should be, for better or worse, considered. However from a policy standpoint, making a mandatory fee (and yes less than 75 makes sense since more people would be bought into it, unless this was the one lone holdout) does not cost more as long as you're already collecting some form of taxes from the residents. So I see no benefit to "society" by having the fee be optional. I see no benefit to the individual to be able to opt out either. If it were 2k a year, talk to me again.


It's not just that I dislike the weighing of lives as if they were coins on a scale, it's that no matter how you weigh them I see no way that not paying for a fire department is a benefit. None. I don't see a single argument here in this thread that is convincing. That's why I'm not moving on it, because I see absolutely no reason to move.

And if rural communities are equally at risk for fire- flammable materials, tanks of fertilizer, brush/prairie/forest fires, tractor or other vehicle fires, lightning, random electrical shorts, arson, whatever the case may be - it makes no sense to me to have differing policies towards fire protection purely on the grounds of location. (Obviously I don't know the statistics, but fire is more like a tornado than an earthquake as far as its frequency and effects. It's far more random and not as widely devastating as floods or earthquakes. However cross comparing disasters really isn't effective or relevant here) The city is willing to and capable of provide service to the county residents. From there it's purely about money. Which means it's doable and both stupid and irresponsible not to manage.

If you're going to write something off as "purely about money" then we'll clearly never find a common ground - remember that it was originally life, liberty and pursuit of property. Money matters - it isn't a minor speed bump, it's an actual protected right for Americans.

Actually it's life liberty and property, not pursuit of. And it was an English concept that actually never made it into the Declaration.