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The Burning Question

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

One of the most disturbing things I've seen online is this report, via Think Progress, Tennessee County's Subscription-Based Firefighters Watch As Family Home Burns Down.

There's a video from the local news's report of the fire:

When we've come to a state of mind in which firefighters will stand around and watch a house burn down either because they think it's the right thing to do — just deserts, you know, should have paid your $75 fire subscription — or because they believe themselves to be helpless pawns in a bureaucratic machine that has sapped their own morality and replaced it with a soulless role morality, either way, something banally evil is going on.

I am not blind to the long-run repeat game aspects of this transaction: without some way to sanction non-payers, the fire department will have trouble collecting its fee from those who see fires as low-probability events. One imperfect solution might be some kind of penalty fee — $1000? — for callouts to the non-payers, and maybe an hourly charge too.

Or, better yet, maybe we should just tax everyone for basic services like fire protection — and especially for those services where the decision to shirk may have negative externalities for the neighbors to whose houses the fire may spread. What a radical idea!

In fact, this is a classic collective action problem that government solves well. Is the world better off letting houses burn down (and next time perhaps with loss of life?) in the name of libertarian purity? No. No way. No how.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on October 05, 2010 (boomark / email).