• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • TP について/About
  • Topics/トピクス
    • Gender/ジェンダー
    • Globalisation/グローバリゼーション
    • Japan and Asia/日本とアジア
    • Japanese/日本語
    • Media/メディア
    • News/ニュース
    • Social Justice/社会正義
    • War and Empire/戦争&支配権力
    • Environment/環境
    • Other Stories/他の記事
  • Links/リンク
  • Contact

TokyoProgressive

Linking Progressives East and West Since 1997

東西のプログレッシブをつなぐ − 1997年設立  |  Linking Progressives East and West Since 1997

Firefighters Let Family’s House Burn Down Because Owner Didn’t Pay $75 Fee

October 5, 2010 by tokyoprogressive Leave a Comment

Ayn Rand Conservatism at Work — Firefighters Let Family’s House Burn Down Because Owner Didn’t Pay $75 Fee

Talk of limited government is appealing until you see what it actually means in practice: a society in which it’s every man for himself.
October 4, 2010  |  
 
 
 
LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
Join our mailing list:

Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email.

 
 
 
 

Thanks to 30 years of right-wing demagoguery about the evils of “collectivism” and the perfidy of “big government” — and a bruising recession that’s devastated state and local budgets — we’re getting a peek at a dystopian nightmare that may be in our not-too-distant future. It’s a picture of a society in which “rugged individualism” run amok means every man for himself.

Call it Ayn Rand’s stark, anti-governmental dream come true, a vision that last week turned into a nightmare for Gene Cranick, a rurual 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.”

Ironically, Obion County describes itself as a “progressive community.” In a recent report (PDF), town officials wrote:

We continue to recruit new industry …. We’re building new roads and new schools and making improvements in health care, law enforcement and tourism. The implementation of a Regional Airport, the construction of the I-69 corridor through Obion County and improvements to our local infrastructure reflect the commitment of our county commissioner and municipal officials.

But last December, a county commission on which every member is a Republican voted to rescind a resolution passed years earlier that would have established a countywide fire department. Their rationale was, of course, the need to keep taxes low, but according to the county commission report, that decision was penny wise but pound foolish. “Because there is no operational county fire department,” the officials noted, “Obion County has missed the opportunity to actively pursue receipt of FEMA Assistance to Firefighters Grants (AFG) and Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), which could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding.”

Firefighting is perhaps the most frequently cited example of a good that the private sector simply isn’t suited to provide. We now deem the task of putting out fires a “public good” — something individuals can’t decide to forgo without the potential of hurting others. But as I note in my new book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, it wasn’t always so. In the early years of our Republic, in cities like Boston and New York, small, privately operated fire brigades vied for property-owners’ business. You’d pay a small fee, and they’d give you a placard to hang on your door identifying you as a client. If a fire did break out, the company would—in theory, anyway—come and douse the flames.

It was a libertarian wet dream, but it was utterly disastrous. Sometimes, several fires broke out simultaneously. Small, independent fire companies could respond to only one or two at a time—they were constrained by their own limited personnel and equipment. It wasn’t profitable to maintain the capacity to deal with a rare occurrence like multiple fires breaking out at once; if a fire company did devote the resources necessary to maintain that capacity, it would then be at a competitive disadvantage with its rivals. That’s why in the modern world, if a massive fire breaks out, fire companies from across a municipality can respond together, specifically because they’re not in competition.

And although one can live just fine without consumer goods—nobody ever died for lack of an iPod—society as a whole suffers a lot of damage from less-than-ideal fire control. While hiring, or not being able to hire, a fire brigade was a private matter that accorded nicely with the principles of the free market, it was also a transaction that came with what economists call negative “externalities”: effects that a transaction between two parties can have on a third. In this case, those effects are fairly obvious: a fire that isn’t properly extinguished can spread rapidly to neighboring homes, potentially resulting in a disastrous conflagration that could consume the whole neighborhood. In Obion County, the firefighters who watched Cranick’s house burn down only responded to the fire once it had spread to the property of a neighbor who’d paid the fee.

Fiddling While Your House Burns

Firefighting is like many other goods that are vital to a healthy society but which the private sector isn’t suited to provide. That’s why the conservative rhetoric about “limited government” is only appealing in the abstract — people really, really like living in a society with adequately funded public services. They like what government does in the specific, even if they have an inherent suspicion of the idea of “big government.”

Translated into the real world of politics and policy, limited government looks something like Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s response to her state’s fiscal crisis. Earlier this year, Brewer signed a budget that eliminated the Children’s Health Insurance Program, denying health care to 47,000 low-income kids in Arizona. She also proposed a hike in the state sales tax—the most regressive tax, whose burden falls disproportionately on working people.

Joining Arizona in eliminating health insurance for the poor was Tennessee, which cut 100,000 people from its Medicaid rolls, including 8,000 children. One of those people was Jessica Pipkin, who lost the use of her arms and legs in a car accident in 2005. Pipkin requires round-the-clock care—at $37 per hour—but was told she would lose her benefits because she and her husband earn too much to qualify. Are they rich? Well, her husband makes $19,000 as a satellite television repairman, and Pipkin receives another $14,000 in Social Security benefits.

In Minnesota, Governor Tim Pawlenty, a contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, submitted a budget that slashed funds from student aid, financial assistance to counties and municipalities, a job program for the blind and the mentally ill, low-income housing programs, mass transit in the Twin Cities, and a state insurance program that helps cover people with costly preexisting medical conditions. It was approved by a Democratically controlled legislature; lawmakers justified their budget by pointing out that they’d rejected Pawlenty’s proposals for deeper, even more painful cuts.

Clayton County, Georgia, a mostly African American suburb of Atlanta, eliminated its bus service into the city, leaving tens of thousands of Georgia’s working poor without a way of getting to their jobs. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” a 57-year-old worker told the Los Angeles Times. “So many people here, they’re going to be sure enough messed up. We need this bus bad.” Oregon, Florida, New Jersey, and Maryland are also looking at deep cuts to public transportation systems to make up budget shortfalls.

Perhaps the most striking vision of the libertarian utopia comes from Ashtabula County, Ohio. It reduced the number of sheriff’s deputies patrolling the 720-square-mile county from 112 to 49 and cut the number of prisoners in detention from 140 to 30. More than 700 people were put “on a waiting list to serve time in the jail.” Some were facing relatively minor charges, but the list also included, according to Sheriff Billy Johnson, violent offenders. When a county judge was asked what citizens should do to protect their families “with the severe cutback in law enforcement,” he responded, “Arm themselves … Be very careful, be vigilant, get in touch with your neighbors, because we’re going to have to look after each other.” A gun instructor told the local news station he agreed with the sentiment. “You don’t have any other option,” he said. “We don’t have the law enforcement out here to handle it right now.”

These are but a few examples of what “limited government” looks like in the real world. They help explain why, as Think Progress noted last week, there’s an ”ever-growing list of Republican candidates and lawmakers” who talk big about “cutting spending” but, when pressed, “can’t provide a single item they would cut from the budget.”

Limited government only sounds good as an abstraction, but the principles of the free market won’t get you too far when your house is on fire.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Filed Under: Social Justice/社会正義 Tagged With: poor, radical right, state crimes

Join the Discussion

Comment on this article or respond to others' comments.

You can post below or send to the mailing list at discuss@list.tokyoprogressive.org.

a) Please sign you name at the bottom of your comment, so that we know who wrote it.

b) To prevent spam, comments need to be manually approved.

c) Comments which are insulting, racist, homophobic or submitted in bad faith will not be published.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Search the site

Archives

Main Categories (old and most recent)

Alternative News Contributors/投稿者 creative Democracy Now Environment/環境 Featured Gender/ジェンダー Globalisation/グローバリゼーション Jacobin Japan/日本 Japan and Asia/日本とアジア Japanese/日本語 Japan Focus Japan News Korea/韓国 latest latest-j links Media/メディア Mp3 National Security Archive neoliberalism new News/ニュース Other Stories/他の記事 Social Justice/社会正義 Topics Uncategorized Video War and Empire/戦争&支配権力

Search deeper

Abe Afghanistan alternative news Bush class issues and homelessness Environmental research fukushima gaza health care Henoko human rights Iraq Iraq, Afganistan and the War on Terror Iraq and Afghanistan, opposing the wars Israel Japan Japan news English Korea labor issues Latin America Middle East military North Korea nuclear nuclear waste Obama Okinawa Okinawa Palestine peace protest protest and resistance racism/human rights radiation state crimes Syria Takae Tepco Trump U.S. War world news English ニュース/社会問題 人権 平和、憲法9条

Design and Hosting for Progressives

Donate/寄付

Please support our work. This includes costs involved in producing this news site as well as our free hosting service for activists, teachers and students. Donations/寄付 can be sent to us via PayPal or Donately. You can also click on the buttons below to make a one-time donation.




Work with us

TokyoProgressive
supports and participates in projects of like-minded people and groups directly (technical, editing, design) and not-so directly (financial or moral support). Likewise, we also welcome contributions by readers that are consistent with promoting social justice. If you have a project you would like help with, or if you would like to submit an article, link, or report on a protest activity, please contact us here.

Footer

All opinions are those of the original authors and may not reflect the views of TokyoProgressive. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for by copyright law in several countries. The material on this site is distributed without profit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyleft 1997-present: tokyoprogressive dot org

TokyoProgressive supports and participates in projects of like-minded people and groups directly (technical, editing, design) and not-so directly (financial or moral support). Likewise, we also welcome contributions by readers that are consistent with promoting social justice. If you have a project you would like help with, or if you would like to submit an article, link, or report on a protest activity, please contact us here.

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in