a libertarian wet dream

[j_b]

Pay to play and personal responsibility in action just like regressives want it:

 

"A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.

Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.

The mayor said if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck.

This fire went on for hours because garden hoses just wouldn't put it out. It wasn't until that fire spread to a neighbor's property, that anyone would respond.

Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.

"I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong," said Gene Cranick.

Because of that, not much is left of Cranick's house.

They called 911 several times, and initially the South Fulton Fire Department would not come.

The Cranicks told 9-1-1 they would pay firefighters, whatever the cost, to stop the fire before it spread to their house.

"When I called I told them that. My grandson had already called there and he thought that when I got here I could get something done, I couldn't," Paulette Cranick.

It was only when a neighbor's field caught fire, a neighbor who had paid the county fire service fee, that the department responded. Gene Cranick asked the fire chief to make an exception and save his home, the chief wouldn't."

http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Firefighters-watch-as-home-burns-to-the-ground-104052668.html

 

[Nitrox]

I like it, a voluntary tax. I bet a lot more people pay the $75 after hearing the story though.

 

I bet after the homeowner takes Obion county to court everyone's property taxes go up regardless of who wins.

 

 

[summitchaserCJB]

Ridiculous.

[olyclimber]

The homeowner should be sued for setting the neighbors field on fire. But don't worry, I'm sure they have insurance!

[billcoe]

Posting it here to start an argument is your wet dream.

[j_b]

I am only giving an opportunity to the sociopaths to explain how their societal model isn't a "fuck you, you are on your own".

 

Did I forget to mention that the town mayor is a republican as are all members of the county commission that should levy taxes for fire-protection? yes, i did forget to mention it.

 

An extract from Harper's excellent piece on AIG and the LA fires of 2008:

 

"The inventor of fire insurance was a Puritan preacher’s son born in seventeenth-century London and baptized If-Jesus-hadn’t-died-for-thee-thou-wouldst-be-Damned Barbon. He went by Nicholas. In 1666, when he was in his late twenties, the Great Fire of London was lit. It started in a baker’s oven on Pudding Lane—someone overcooked some bacon—and because the baker’s house was made of wood and his neighbors’ houses were made of wood and there was no fire service, it spread easily. People ran in every direction, carting away valuables in horse carriages. “The noise and cracking and thunder of impetuous flames,” wrote one observer, “the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like a hideous storm.” Two prisons, eighty-seven churches, and more than 13,000 homes, housing 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 citizens, were destroyed.

 

Barbon’s response was to give London its first firefighters since the Roman era: one contemporary described them as “Servants in livery with badges, who are watermen and other lusty persons” who are always ready “when any sudden fire happens, which they are very laborious and dexterous at quelling, not sticking in cases of necessity to expose themselves to great hazards.” His Fire Office offered insurance policies for seven, eleven, twenty-one, or thirty-one years—two shillings, six pence per pound of rent for a brick house, twice that for a wooden one, with the services of the lusty watermen included. He signed up more than 4,000 clients.

 

He soon attracted competition: the Friendly Society, the General Insurance Company, the Hand-in-Hand Company. Each brigade had its own uniform—blue coats with red linings, or blue shirts with silver buttons, or yellow pants and silver-buckled shoes—and its own firemarks, metal plaques posted on homes so that everyone would know exactly who should save whom. Whenever part of London burned, the brigades competed so well for water and space that authorities had to impose fines: five shillings for hitting a rival fireman; two shillings, six pence for pouring water on him. By the early 1800s, private firefighters were replaced by public firefighters, for whom the only adversary was fire.

 

Barbon’s other response to the Great Fire has almost been forgotten: he became a developer of newly cheap land—“the leading speculative builder of his generation,” according to the historian Leo Hollis. Such a builder that in 1684 the justices of Middlesex complained about “the many great inconveniences occasioned by the late increase of buildings” at his Red Lion Square development. But growth was Barbon’s creed. He never stopped defending it. In 1685, to protest Britain’s new building tax, he distributed a pamphlet, “Apology for the Builder.” In 1690, he followed up with “A Discourse of Trade,” which has since secured his reputation as one of the fathers of free-market economics.

 

In “Discourse,” published nearly a century before Adam Smith gave us the invisible hand, are the seeds of modern capitalism—and its original sin:

 

The Native Staple of each Country is the Riches of the Country, and is perpetual, and never to be consumed; Beasts of the Earth, Fowls of the Air, and Fishes of the Sea, Naturally Increase: There is Every Year a New Spring and Autumn, which produceth a New Stock of Plants and Fruits. And the Minerals of the Earth are Unexhaustable; and if the Natural Stock be Infinite, the Artificial Stock that is made of the Natural, must be Infinite.

 

“This sheweth a Mistake,” Barbon wrote, by those who would commend “Parsimony, Frugality, and Sumptuary Laws, as the means to make a Nation Rich.” He believed there were no fundamental limits to supply, no real consequences to growth; man could skim infinitely off the top of nature without being subject to its rules. What made an economy great, then, was the demand side—spend, spend, spend, grow, grow, grow—and Barbon was one of the first to recognize that man’s physical needs, the “Wants of the Body,” could play but a small part in this. It was the all-consuming Wants of the Mind that mattered. He celebrated our irrational taste for luxury, for constantly shifting styles: “Fashion or the alteration of Dress . . . is the Spirit and Life of Trade; It is an Invention to Dress a Man, as if he lived in a perpetual Spring; he never sees the Autumn of his Cloaths.”

 

Three hundred years before the American housing boom that fueled fires both real and metaphoric, Barbon railed against government meddling and called building “the chiefest Promoter of Trade.” He celebrated what happens when we cluster in cities: “Man being Naturally Ambitious, the Living together, occasion Emulation, which is seen by Out-Vying one another in Apparel, Equipage, and Furniture of the House; whereas, if a Man lived Solitary alone, his chiefest Expence, would be Food.” Barbon would have looked at the subdivisions spreading across the Los Angeles foothills, the gated communities, the leased Land Rovers and Mercedes Benzes—so much Artificial Stock made of the Natural—and seen a free-market economy at its peak.

 

Barbon died bankrupt in 1698, but his legacy survived, thanks in part to the work of one man: Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. In his thirty-seven years as CEO of AIG, Greenberg turned the company into an $81 billion icon of American capitalism—largely by inventing increasingly abstract ways to insure increasingly abstract investments—only to be forced out in 2005 when Eliot Spitzer, then New York’s attorney general, began investigating him and AIG over accounting irregularities.

 

In 2006, Greenberg’s aides created a think tank for him, and, in honor of another inventor of groundbreaking insurance products, they cleverly named it the Barbon Institute. It was part of a larger rehabilitation campaign: they would pay a Massachusetts public relations firm, eSapience, to hire well-known academics—-including the dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and professors from the University of Chicago, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and University College London—to say good things about Greenberg, write papers that underscored his genius, and host conferences that let him be keynote speaker. According to an internal memo, eSapience would also “leverage” its “relationships with important and highly credible channels,” including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. “Mr. Greenberg will share his views on corporate governance,” the memo said, “as a result of his more than thirty years at the helm of one of the most successful companies in business history.”

 

The campaign faltered. After eSapience sent Greenberg a bill for $2.3 million, he refused to pay, the company sued him, and everything became public. When AIG itself later collapsed, Greenberg, still a major stockholder, lost at least $2 billion and got kicked off Forbes’s list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. The Barbon Institute, which eSapience had used to host a 2006 seminar at New York’s St. Regis Hotel at which Greenberg addressed fifty top insurance executives, would be the campaign’s only bright point. Its name seems cleverer by the day."

Too big to burn

[JayB]

I am only giving an opportunity to the sociopaths to explain how their societal model isn't a "fuck you, you are on your own".

 

Were you talking to these guys?

 

"San Diego Pension Scandal Called "Worse Than Bell""

http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/story/San-Diego-Pension-Scandal-Called-Worse-Than-Bell/iVFlhMOZWECMOs8JWq0u_g.cspx

 

How about the Seattle PD?

 

"The cops' contract is so rich, with guaranteed 5 percent raises every year, that if they went along with a one-year freeze the savings would erase the need to lay off any cops at all.

 

"I would give up my 5 percent raise to save the job of another deputy," said Sgt. John Urquhart, the sheriff's spokesman, whose pay is covered under the contract. "But then again I live in King County because I can afford to, my kids are grown and out of college, and my wife works. Most deputies don't have those luxuries."

 

Except that last year, 330 of the roughly 750 members of the King County police force made more than $100,000, including overtime. Twenty-five made more than $140,000.

 

Some of those are chiefs and high-rankers. But most are police out on the county beat. The highest paid was Deputy Mike Miner. He made $228,000 — $128,000 in overtime pay alone.

 

I get they have demanding jobs, way tougher than most of us. But 27 percent raises are the stuff of bubbles that popped long ago. Would it kill to freeze these whopping pay levels for a year — especially if it meant protecting the public at full force, as is said to be so important?

 

I called the union to ask, but haven't heard back (yet!). Jarrett said he thinks many of the unions still don't get it.

 

"I would say, with some exceptions, that most seem more interested in maintaining their compensation packages than in saving jobs," he said.

 

This was confessed, bluntly, by the head of the union for Metro bus drivers, Paul Bachtel. He recently told Times reporter Mike Lindblom: "They [drivers] don't expect to give up wages, benefits, working conditions, when the transit agency could cut some of its services, and not take away pay."

 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2012959858_danny22.html

 

I think it's much fairer and far more progressive to have a system where those that own private property pay the costs to protect it from fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, falling trees, lightning, etc, etc, etc, etc than to force everyone, including those who are far less well off, to fork over money to protect what other people own.

 

I suspect that if there was actually anyone inside the house at the time that it was burning, the fire department would have done what they could to rescue them. Even if they were sociopaths that had no qualms about letting people burn to death, the people at the top would probably have the sense to realize that doing so would cost them their jobs, at the very least.

 

IMO saving lives should be the primary focus of fire-fighting efforts, with saving private property being a priority only inasmuch as it's necessary to save lives.

 

I'd be happy if we had a two-tier system where everyone paid in for the life saving services, and those who wanted protection for their private property would fork over risk-based premiums for that.

[Nitrox]

Never seen such a whiny, needy, bitch as j_b in all my life. For fucks sake, you're an embarrassment.

[kevbone]

Never seen such a whiny, needy, bitch in all my life as j_b.

 

Really? You have never seen Fairweather?

[hafilax]

The biggest problem with that protection racket is that if my neighbor chooses not to protect their house it's a threat to mine. Even in the case the fire spread to the house next door at which point the fire department went into action. Any of that damage would have been entirely avoidable if the original fire had been put out. Is it up to me to convince my neighbor to buy into it or pay for it myself?

 

That model might work in rural areas where houses are spread out and the emergency response might not be timely but if the fire can spread from house to house it isn't in the town's best interests IMO.

[JayB]

Maybe - but enough of an outlier to be a minimal problem in reality for a few reasons.

 

The first is that the actual incidence of home fires is so low these days, which is why firemen have found ways to keep busy by responding to medical calls.

 

Then there's the fact that not paying would probably cost them more elsehwere, like on their homeowner's policy, banks would require it as a condition of extending a loan, etc.

 

And finally - there's peer pressure from the neighbors.

 

Wouldn't be perfect, but IMO it'd be better than someone in a duplex subsidizing the cost of fire suppression for someone living in a mansion, much less someone who doesn't own any property forking over money to protect someone else's.

 

 

[Jim]

I really enjoy these conversations when they take new and unpredictable turns.

[olyclimber]

Oh! Lets discuss the insurance industry (racket) as a whole! You pay a company to protect your assets and then they use the money you pay them to hire lawyers and detectives to figure out how to get out of paying you when you really need it! Deductibles are carefully set to average theft $ rates, for example, so you never use the insurance (unless you want to commit fraud). Of course you can pay more for a lower deductible! This is all optional of course, except for the mandatory insurances.

 

Not that it would run better as a state institution. Just bitching about the racket.

[j_b]

The injustice of regressive taxation isn't an argument for no taxation. It's an argument for progressive taxes so that low income brackets don't pay fire protection for the wealthy. Letting those who can't pay without fire protection (education, access to the outdoors, ..) is the kind of world that sociopaths are engineering all around us.

[hafilax]

Maybe - but enough of an outlier to be a minimal problem in reality for a few reasons.

 

The first is that the actual incidence of home fires is so low these days, which is why firemen have found ways to keep busy by responding to medical calls.

 

Then there's the fact that not paying would probably cost them more elsehwere, like on their homeowner's policy, banks would require it as a condition of extending a loan, etc.

 

And finally - there's peer pressure from the neighbors.

 

Wouldn't be perfect, but IMO it'd be better than someone in a duplex subsidizing the cost of fire suppression for someone living in a mansion, much less someone who doesn't own any property forking over money to protect someone else's.

 

Can you explain the advantages a little better. Maybe I don't understand the system well enough (I didn't read the long posts above if it's in there). How does a duplex owner end up paying less than someone with a mansion?

[j_b]

Local taxes are notoriously regressive so yes the duplex people do pay part of the mansion fire protection cost, but as said in my post above regressive taxes have never been an argument for no taxes and optional fire protection. That's just terrible logic to pretend the opposite.

[G-spotter]

let's extend this same logical discussion to vaccinations!

 

imagine if, instead of this guy's house burning down, it was his daughter dying of measles because he thought she'd get autism if he had her vaccinated?

[j_b]

"According to documents prepared by the county in 2008, a paltry 0.13 cent increase in property taxes on each household would be all it would take to fund fire services for the towns within the county."

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/05/after-firefighters-obion-expands/

 

"Let's save 0.13 cent so that joe blow who can't pay for fire protection is further in the hole once his house is burnt to the ground".

 

Freakin sociopaths!

[billcoe]

JB obviously wants the federal government to pass a national law making fire insurance 100 percent mandatory 100 percent of the time.

 

His wet dream.

[j_b]

Were you talking to these guys?

 

"San Diego Pension Scandal Called "Worse Than Bell""

http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/story/San-Diego-Pension-Scandal-Called-Worse-Than-Bell/iVFlhMOZWECMOs8JWq0u_g.cspx

 

How about the Seattle PD?

 

"The cops' contract is so rich, with guaranteed 5 percent raises every year, that if they went along with a one-year freeze the savings would erase the need to lay off any cops at all.

 

[..]

 

This was confessed, bluntly, by the head of the union for Metro bus drivers, Paul Bachtel. He recently told Times reporter Mike Lindblom: "They [drivers] don't expect to give up wages, benefits, working conditions, when the transit agency could cut some of its services, and not take away pay."

 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2012959858_danny22.html

 

Perhaps, some day JayB will go after someone other than the few workers on the gravy train, but I am not holding my breath. It's not like there are not more important fish to fry but his insistence on focusing on the piddling stuff shows that libertarianism is a convenient fig leaf for corporatists.

[j_b]

JB obviously wants the federal government to pass a national law making fire insurance 100 percent mandatory 100 percent of the time.

 

how about those death panels for grandpa? huh? fuckin soshalists!

[JayB]

Maybe - but enough of an outlier to be a minimal problem in reality for a few reasons.

 

The first is that the actual incidence of home fires is so low these days, which is why firemen have found ways to keep busy by responding to medical calls.

 

Then there's the fact that not paying would probably cost them more elsehwere, like on their homeowner's policy, banks would require it as a condition of extending a loan, etc.

 

And finally - there's peer pressure from the neighbors.

 

Wouldn't be perfect, but IMO it'd be better than someone in a duplex subsidizing the cost of fire suppression for someone living in a mansion, much less someone who doesn't own any property forking over money to protect someone else's.

 

Can you explain the advantages a little better. Maybe I don't understand the system well enough (I didn't read the long posts above if it's in there). How does a duplex owner end up paying less than someone with a mansion?

 

The real beauty of my plan is that is has zero chance of being implemented anywhere, but as long as we're playing fantasy football here - I suspect that some kind of risk-based premium would determine how much each person paid, so one-bedroom shack constructed out of pure asbestos that's sited next door to a fire station would pay less than a super-rural McMansion surrounded by a few thousand acres of dry timber. Not sure how the formula would work in practice, but I suspect that the more resources it would take to actually save your structure from burning to the ground, the more you'd pay.

 

Some of the more egregious cases of people with less valuable, less risky property subsidizing people with more valuable, more risky property are the various mechanisms that were created to transfer the financial risks associated with owning coastal properties onto those that don't.

 

In my regressive fantasy world, you wanna live on the coast and savor the sunsets over a nice Shiraz on the back deck, you take all of the financial risk associated with building and owning a property there - and no one else.

[JayB]

Were you talking to these guys?

 

"San Diego Pension Scandal Called "Worse Than Bell""

http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/story/San-Diego-Pension-Scandal-Called-Worse-Than-Bell/iVFlhMOZWECMOs8JWq0u_g.cspx

 

How about the Seattle PD?

 

"The cops' contract is so rich, with guaranteed 5 percent raises every year, that if they went along with a one-year freeze the savings would erase the need to lay off any cops at all.

 

[..]

 

This was confessed, bluntly, by the head of the union for Metro bus drivers, Paul Bachtel. He recently told Times reporter Mike Lindblom: "They [drivers] don't expect to give up wages, benefits, working conditions, when the transit agency could cut some of its services, and not take away pay."

 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2012959858_danny22.html

 

Perhaps, some day JayB will go after someone other than the few workers on the gravy train, but I am not holding my breath. It's not like there are not more important fish to fry but his insistence on focusing on the piddling stuff shows that libertarianism is a convenient fig leaf for corporatists.

 

If unfunded liabilities to the tune of ~$3 trillion that will crowd out funding for parks, social services, etc, etc, etc is piddling then...sure.

 

This is happening in real time in WA.

[JayB]

"According to documents prepared by the county in 2008, a paltry 0.13 cent increase in property taxes on each household would be all it would take to fund fire services for the towns within the county."

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/05/after-firefighters-obion-expands/

 

"Let's save 0.13 cent so that joe blow who can't pay for fire protection is further in the hole once his house is burnt to the ground".

 

Freakin sociopaths!

 

It's clear that the "victim" in this story could have paid the $75, but didn't. He was counting on other people to foot the bill for fire services for him.

 

Who, exactly, is the sociopath here?

[JayB]

let's extend this same logical discussion to vaccinations!

 

imagine if, instead of this guy's house burning down, it was his daughter dying of measles because he thought she'd get autism if he had her vaccinated?

 

Also happening in real time.

 

I'm not in favor of forced vaccination for a variety of practical and philosophical reasons, but I am in favor of allowing people to bring civil suits against unvaccinated people who transmit whatever disease they're the vector for when they transmit the disease to infants, the immunosuppresed, or any other people who either can't be vaccinated or can't be effectively protected by vaccines as a result of another medical condition.