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Miss a fee and firefighters watch your house burn. Maybe?
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It can be privately-run whilst being tax funded, as I wrote on the second page of the thread. Or government-run while being privately funded, as occurred here. The two issues are pretty separable. In this case the difficulties revolve almost entirely around private funding and how it is structured; that the fire department involved was run by a government is essentially irrelevant.
Regional governments can contract with private operators to cover a given area and so on, funding said contract using tax. Whether or not this is better than running it themselves depends on the region's history.
Organized firefighting is an outgrowth of urbanization.
e: and, of course, mass suburban populations and different approaches to firefighting date to as recently as the postwar period.
Completely unconfirmed as far as I know, so cite that if you can.
Yes. Those mechanisms are not free, either.
I wonder what happens the first time this fire department loses somebody's proof of payment. "Sorry, sir, but you'll have to show us your receipt. Oh, it's in the burning house? Too bad then."
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At which point this guy deserves just the smallest smidgen of credit for claiming that he did pay the $75, using a money order or something. The media coverage would have been insane.
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Actually, no. Even non-urban communities have had sheriffs for a long time. The notion of someone legitimately tasked with enforcing the law by force, at least in Anglo-American tradition, dates way back to the 1300s.
Well, this says:
More formally, we have this, from 2008 (warning: PDF):
Presuming this narrative is right: the cities realized that the rural areas were freeloading off their fire protection and seem to have wanted to cut it off for some time (which would explain why the Mayor of South Fulton ordered the fire brigade to sit on its hands in this incident, as some reports claim).
As late as 2008 the municipal fire services would have put the fire out anyway, attempted to recover costs ex post, fail in most instances (both the UCFD page and the Obion County Fire Department proposal claim this), and then cover costs by appealing to Federal aid assistance, or simply letting the city pick up the tab. Something changed since 2008 - the "city fathers" finally decided that paying for fire services outside their tax base just wasn't their responsibility - and Mr. Cranick got to be the first rural resident to experience the change.
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LAST CHANCE
If you are talking about authorization by the government, the King granted permission for citizens to form watches to put out fires in many places.
It's not authorization by government but funding and administration by the government. Accepting the existence of voluntary brigades isn't tantamount to what you claimed, i.e., that the government is supposed to provide such services. Because it isn't providing it; volunteers are. If the volunteers go away, or fight among themselves, the City of London would not step in. At least until fairly recently.
And the US still has places with entirely voluntary and entirely charity-funded fire departments, or even places with nil fire departments at all. But there are exactly zero places in the US that are 'outside' some law enforcement's jurisdiction.
1.) If it had been a case where (human) life safety was in jeopardy upon the FD's arrival, I do not doubt that they would have taken action to enact rescue at that point. Whether they would have withdrawn and let the fire take the building after that is neither here nor there.
2.) Considering the nature of both manpower and resources of your typical rural, volunteer fire department theres a considerable chance this fire could have taken the house anyway. But I imagine thats little comfort to the effected.
See, you keep talking about this being a local issue as if that it is supposed to make it ok. However, there's a key detail that you are glossing over here: county and city governments are not sovereign entities. The US is somewhat unusual in that it has dual sovereignty between states and the Federal government, but that does not extend down further to more local levels of government, which are only structured at the behest of state and federal law. Leaving fire protection to the counties and cities is something the state makes an affirmative decision to either do or not do. In this case it was not dealt with by the state and left inadequately dealt with by the country.
And treating this as an edge case on fire protection is rather intellectually dishonest in my opinion. It's not as if this house was 10 miles from his nearest neighbor and 100 miles from a town with a fire department. Of course in that case not much can be expected from the government if your house catches on fire. In this case, he was close enough to be within the area of a nearby fire department, and they had the resources and capability to show up, and they even did. They simply did not help him due to the lack of fee payment.
This financing mechanism through fees and specifically not helping those who didn't pay created pretty demonstrably poor results. The firefighters still had to spend time and resources to show up to protect the neighbors who did pay, but still let extensive damage happen. It should be painfully obvious that something is odd because the difference of a $75 dollar fee is what determined the outcome.
This is like a textbook example of what is wrong with letting essential government services being handled in an a la carte manner. Unnecessary destruction due to the foolishness or shortsightedness of specific individuals, expending resources to not even prevent that destruction, and externalities with damage done to the neighbors who did pay. There where resources available to properly respond to the fire, they were just improperly applied due to failures in the state and local governments.
Sure, you can try to shoehorn this into the idea of insurance, but the first thing that came to mind to me on this case was not so kind. Rather, he didn't pay the protection money, so his house burned.
Heh... I like how you made that plural.
I'm not going to continue to post in this thread after this thought, since with the infraction I earned, it's clear my opinion is not welcome, and I like other threads enough to not throw away this account on something this dumb.
The point is, the system is NOT a bad one just because bad things are allowed to happen. That mode of thinking gets us into major trouble. Car accidents and cancer are "allowed" to happen because we are not federally mandated how much risk we can take with our vehicles or bad food or cigarettes. We are generally only limited to how much we can put others at risk with them.
In this case, one person sustained MINOR damage to his property due to the choices and actions of his neighbor. That is "allowed" to happen in nearly every part of American life, as it should. The alternative is too much control from the government if we are never allowed to put anyone near us at risk from anything, ever. It means no guns, no cars, knives, etc.
It is very easy to proclaim that anyone who resists additional control over their lives by the government is a libertarian nutcase, but there is a balance that everyone desires somewhere along the scale. Many people, although not those present here, believe that the proper place on the scale allows room for some communities like the one we are discussing to exist.
I just wish the type of people that frequent these forums (intelligent but very left) were more accepting that there may be other valid opinions in the universe besides the one they all share with each other.
/conservative done
which is, I daresay, not subtle enough for you to claim that you weren't really saying Bowen was a cocksucking hippie.
Savant, complaining that a la carte funding is inferior is not meaningful unless other means of funding, like taxes, are considered acceptable by the relevant states or lower governments.
Saying "but this is a basic government service!!" is not meaningful unless it comes along with "so here is a basic tax to fund it!". Spending is easier to advocate than ways of funding said spending.
I left out the tax part because that had already been covered earlier, but yes the obvious way to deal with fire coverage is through taxation, as long as there is enough of a community formed for there to actually support at least some form of fire response. There's lots of different ways to tax that would work acceptably, though if it is outside of the scope of an incorporated town or city but close enough to warrant fire coverage it should probably be handled by the county or state.
A property tax seems the most obvious choice to me, but it's not the only one.
Edit: And also remember that there should be at least some measure of fire prevention in states beyond simply municipal fire departments, if for no other reason than to deal with wildfires. Not that people would expect that to handle a routine house fire, but that would need a source of funding as well.
Let's say that my community decides to have an opt-in, fee based Fire Department, with no tax support.
I decide not to pay the fee. After all, my house has been in my family for generations, and never caught fire. We're a careful people, not like some jobless slobs on the other side of the tracks! So I skip the fee and all is good.
Eventually more and more of my friends start skipping the fee too. No one can tell us what to do....We aren't putting anyone else in danger. They can pay the fee if they want too and they will be fine. It's not like a fire can get out of control, right? We start to see commercials and fliers for the Fire Dept bake sale, and chuckle to ourselves.
Soon so many people have thrown off the shackles of Too-Much-Government that the Fire Department goes under, because there aren't enough fees to operate.
And then some jerk falls asleep while smoking and the whole town burns down.
Your opinion very much isn't welcome (at least to me), but not because you're a conservative. It's because of the silly goosery of "I'm going to get in the last word and run away NO TAGBACKS!!!!!111", combined with the personal snit of how you're just forced to leave because of the ravening, clueless hordes.
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Well, yeah. Exactly. Except, unlike gangsters, with this fire department it truly is protection money (not "protection" money)...they won't come set the fire to prove a point if you fail to pay. But, unfortunately, their only method of encouraging you to pay is to (even if they have to show up to protect your neighbor) let your house burn...otherwise you have no incentive to support their ongoing operations (and presumably you'd be unable to pay the entire bill for your incident...nor would anybody else...which is where the insurance angle comes in).
If you want fire insurance to replace your property, buy that. If you want people to show up and try to keep it from burning, buy that. If you're smart, you'll buy both. And maybe this county will get off their asses and institute some rural fire protection of their own, funded by *gasp* taxes, now.
Obviously I don't consider this to be an optimal system. Firefighting is something best paid for by taxes and offered universally within the taxed area (and, where necessary and feasible, even covered by taxes from other areas...state/federal grants and the like). But am I a bad person in that, in this case, the only real problem I'm seeing is the possibility of a paperwork SNAFU causing somebody who did pay their fee to appear that they didn't, causing their house to burn down? Because otherwise, as a homeowner (and a non-idiot), this would be the easiest $75 check I'd write each year.
I mean, if you can eliminate the damage to other property (and in a rural area, it's fairly easy for the department to do that without saving the structure), and if you could eliminate the possibility of a paperwork problem fucking a resident over...well, I'm pretty much okay with this guy's place burning down. Somebody tried to be a free rider, and it bit them in the ass.
It's still a bad system in general, I would not be happy if I had to argue with someone on the phone that I've paid it too.
People in these areas have simply chosen a different lifestyle than those of us in urban parts of the country. They're generally okay with the risks involved, or they wouldn't live there. The risks are outweighed by certain freedoms that urban people can't enjoy (such as very few zoning laws, the ability to shoot and hunt on one's land, no nosy neighbors getting in your business etc.).
If people living in urban county X are okay with a low level of government services, that's their right.
Rigorous Scholarship
Yup, it's pretty much the only reason such a system is unacceptable to me. Like I said, in this actual circumstance I'm absolutely okay with the actual result of this policy. My only concern is with the hypothetical, not this incident in particular.
Basically, the thread title doesn't bother me. Miss a fee and watch your house burn? Sure. Pay the fee and your house may still burn because somebody didn't file it? Yeah, that's an issue, and the reason this whole system fails.
This area doesn't seem like the Alaskan outback, it's not that rural. And the lack of rural fire protection seems more like a matter of inefficient county government and some fucktards sabotaging the system than any kind of consensus that livin' the country life is worth not having access to fire trucks.
I've lived in some rural-ass areas. While the response time may leave something to be desired, we always had basic access to these services. Unless you live over a pass that's closed in winter, or something....which, again, not the case here.
Like, I reject the assertion that 51% of people should be able to deny my county basic fire protection, if said protection is feasible, because they want to save $50 a year in taxes or some such. That's fucking retarded.
It's not like we all get to vote how our tax money is collected and distributed on a case by case basis, why should they get to vote on how tax money in the county is spent? That's stupid. I also thought that was the whole point of "elect me because I won't raise taxes!" not "elect me and I won't put a vote out to raise taxes!"
That's democracy. You're really only entitled to the government services that you and the members of the relevant polity are willing to pay for, through taxes. If 50%+1 of your neighbors decide that paying for a fire department, paved roads and a public sewer system costs too much money, that decision may or may not be idiotic, but it is their right. Your options, if you don't like that decisions, are to move or try and get them to change their minds.
I get a sense that people on this thread think that rural people shouldn't be allowed to make different decisions than urban folks when it comes to what government services they want.
Rigorous Scholarship
How on earth do you think that public policy comes to exist in the first place? No great moral legislator in the sky reaches down and makes things right and ethical. We conduct social experiments and (hopefully) legislate based on findings to support the common good.
Rigorous Scholarship
I will take you sometime. There is much beer to be discovered.
I realize this was several pages back, but I feel the need to interject here.
Everyone in the United states lives in a county. The only way the county does not have direct authority over your or your property is if you are in an incorporated area, which this guy obviously wasn't.
Another point which I feel isn't getting enough play in what I have read of the thread so far is that this is a fire that the man started himself. This wasn't an 'act of god'. He didn't lose a metaphorical dice roll here. He started a fire on his property, not having any sort of protections versus catastrophic fire.
And it wouldn't have even been catastrophic if he had been practicing good fire safety.
As for the firefighters not putting the fire out on his property, but tossing water on the property of his neighbors that were paid up:
If he didn't call the fire department, and instead his neighbor did when the fire became a sufficient size to be noticeable from the next property then the point is moot. You can't save a double-wide when you are dealing with that kind of response time. It's gone. Since there were no humans at risk, and it is outside their coverage area the officer on scene is quite justified in simply keeping it from spreading to adjacent areas.
Insurance is serious business, and run by suits with no fire training. If any of those fireman had hurt themselves in the response (a risk factor which is quite significant) they would have nothing.
If it were me, my response to putting out the trailer would have been "What are you, nuts? It's already gone!"
As for the pets that died, smoke inhalation kills fare more readily than the flames. Any pet that didn't get out before the fire department shows up from the nearby city is already dead by the time they arrive.
The earlier observation that it is effectively triage is totally correct. Any fire fighter will concentrate on saving what they can save first.
Should they have put water on the wreckage of the guys house? Perhaps. But if they didn't it wasn't because of a moral or ethical failure.
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Most fire trucks have a 1000 to 1500 gallon water tank on them. at full tilt they can discharge this water in about 60 seconds.
A community that is not paying for fire service is likely also not paying for the infrastructure that a fire service requires, like a community water supply feeding to hydrants.
When the water you have to work with is limited, you will be much more likely to not toss any of it at an un-savable structure and saving it for surrounding structures.
Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
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The county the man lives in has a fire department that exists only on paper, with no funding or personnel. The entire county lives off municipal fire departments which, correspondingly, have no authority over such people and cannot tax him to pay for the fire department upkeep.
The county could, of course, tax the man involved, but it didn't.
Note that some parts of the county apparently rely on municipal fire departments from another state (and county, of course). It so happens that the FD involved was in the same county. This seems to be where the confusion of differing counties comes from.
Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!