Tennessee Firemen Ignore Burning House Over Unpaid Subscription Fee

[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by KSig RC

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.