Tomasky: John Galt Joins the Fire Brigade
Michael Tomasky writes:
The situation of a Mr. Gene Cranick of Obion County, Tennessee has been attracting a bit of attention, and for obvious reasons. From Joshua Holland at Alternet:
Call it Ayn Rand's stark, anti-governmental dream come true, a vision that last week turned into a nightmare for Gene Cranick, a rural homeowner in Obion County, Tennessee. Cranick hadn't forked over $75 for the subscription fire protection service offered to the county's rural residents, so when firefighters came out to the scene, they just stood there, with their equipment on the trucks, while Cranick's house burned to the ground. According to the local NBC TV affiliate, 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."
The fire chief could have made an exception on the spot, but refused to do so. Pressed by the local NBC news team for an explanation, Mayor David Crocker said, "if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck."
It's kind of difficult to imagine the commitment to ideology that would make a fire chief just have his men stand there while an actual fire engulfed an actual home of an actual human, especially when said human is vowing that he'll pay not just $75 but anything they want.
I'll grant you: the residents of Obion County who haven't paid their $75 are surely paying up in spades today. Point made.
However, this is fairly incredible, isn't it? Interesting post on the matter from the National Review's Daniel Foster, who takes the view that it's pretty overboard and "bad for libertarians," while office mate Kevin Williamson was in the "let the sucker burn" school based on application of the Pareto Principle.
I only know very literally what the Pareto Principle is and don't understand its relevance is to the current case. Foster make an unconvincing (and possibly half-hearted, since it wasn't his view but Williamson's) case for its application here.
I won't quite go the full nine yards of saying that this is what life would be like in tea party America. Not quite. But I'll go 4.5 yards for sure. Remember, this country (like pretty much all countries) used to have private fire departments. They didn't work well.
Specifically, the idea of competition proved inimical to the successful fighting of fires, or put more broadly, to the successful implementation and continuation of a common good. As I have been suggesting in other recent posts, we may be entering a historical period when we have to relearn these old lessons all over again.
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