Firemen stand and watch a man's home burn to the ground, and do... nothing.

[abovenyquist]

I don't know if Olbermann's attempts to link this to Tea Party philosophy is valid; it seems that most Tea Partiers believe there should be some taxpayer-funded services (state and local level, of course), like, say putting out fires. But that aside... firemen standing and watching a home burn to the ground? At some point, wouldn't you expect a bit

Comments

[anaisdjuna]

You would think or hope some decency would kick in. The whole pay a fee to subscribe smells a lot like a protection racket to me.

[tyme]

It's possible that they didn't pay their premiums... the Savannah VFD was like that, they were obligated to evacuate all human residents, but aside from that they were not to put out the fire if you did not pay the subscription 'fee'.

[weezyl]

Welcome to your brave new libertarian world.

[eliset]

I fail to see the difference between "Tea Party" and Objectivists.

[selenite]

They weren't just watching, they were protecting the home of someone who had paid for the service. Rather than deploying they could have refused to cover anyone out of their jurisdiction and not responded at all. It's a classic case of the free rider problem. Whether that town picked the best solution to the problem is debatable

[abovenyquist]

As I responded to gaeasson below, this seems to be a case of crappy policy making on the part of county (and perhaps state) officials. People are paying taxes to entities covering larger geographic regions than just the city, and even the most Capital L Libertarians I know tend to put "fire protection" and "police protection" into things a government should probably be doing

[selenite]

wait, there's big chunks of land with people living on them that had no fire protection at all?

Sure. If an area has a population density of one person per hundred square miles it hardly makes sense to set up a full time fire department. Even if you set it up as one truck per thousand people it'd be covering such a large area that the houses would always be ash by the time the truck got there.

That's an absurd example, of course, but there's a wide range of population densities and at some point it no longer makes sense to have a fire department on call. Where to draw the line is one of those things we'll argue about . . . but there has to be a line or we bankrupt ourselves trying to do the impossible.

I'll also point out that turning down a cash offer on the spot is the behavior of a government agency. A private firm would take a large payment to go into action (a tradition going back to Republican Rome--Crassus made a lot of money that way). Assuming government regulations didn't prohibit it, of course.

would the Capital L