Attention rural folks
You do have to actually pay for fire and emergency services in some parts of the state. Otherwise, the fire department will show up and watch your house burn.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
Uncle Pays the Bills
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December 8th, 2011 at 9:48 am
Yup, same county as last year. You’d think the message would have gotten out. And you’d think insurance companies would have gone around and paid the fee for everyone and sent them a bill by now as well.
December 8th, 2011 at 10:00 am
You would think the county government would simply contract with the city and add the cost to the property taxes. It would sure save them a lot of bad publicity.
December 8th, 2011 at 10:13 am
I can’t imagine the insurance companies haven’t already pushed that through.
December 8th, 2011 at 10:16 am
These folks also didn’t have insurance.
December 8th, 2011 at 10:23 am
This is the perfect example of a Libertarian paid-services world. Didn’t pay? No service. I figure a for profit fire company would have a “pay today, sign your life away” plan that they could offer if they showed up to a situation like this. $75 can quickly become $7500 in such a scenario.
Personally, this is one of those services I feel that the taxpayers should pay for, along with sewage treatment and waste disposal. You own property, you pay property tax. The main reason for this is so that it doesn’t burn to cinders while you and others watch. A rural piece of land may not need power, sewer, waste disposal, or law enforcement, but it certainly needs fire control and prevention.
December 8th, 2011 at 10:45 am
The fire dept’s rule is to respond and assist in getting the humans out safely but not assist in putting out the fires in non-paying homes.
Is humane and responsible. They are not volunteers. It is a municipally supported fire department. City taxpayers pay for the tools, trucks, training, liability, and payroll. Non-payers don’t support the service in any way, shape, or form. It is $75. Mow a few yards and pay the damn service fee.
December 8th, 2011 at 11:39 am
75 bucks is some damn cheap insurance. The Fire department did show up. To make sure no one needed rescue and to make sure the fire did not spread to those who pay the fee… This is a voluntary tax. You do not have to pay it but you do not get the benefits from it either. I wish more places did things like this. Say for public education. If I have no Kids and I never went to public school why should I have to pay the taxes so the kids I don’t have can go to school?
December 8th, 2011 at 11:43 am
Seems like it would be easier to fight the fire, then bill the owners afterwards.
December 8th, 2011 at 11:45 am
Bob, that’s how it works in my town. They’ll send you a bill for about $10K, I hear.
December 8th, 2011 at 12:11 pm
Armed Partisan you have it wrong.
In a libertarian world, you could sign a contract with the fire department to pay the COST of using the equipment and their time in fighting the fire when the arrive on the scene.
This is the result of a socialism plan with forced taxation where if you don’t pay they just let your house burn. Why not just charge them the actual cost of extinguishing the fire if they didn’t pay the service fee?
You’d make a lot more than just the 75 bucks. Oh that’s right it’s a government monopoly, not private enterprise.
December 8th, 2011 at 1:59 pm
But what about the TAXES you paid for that fire department? Surely the county TAXES the residents?
Seems like if you paid the TAXES you should get the benefits.
December 8th, 2011 at 2:55 pm
I’m in Knox County, about 2 miles from UT. Barely outside the city limit so city fire protection service is not applicable. The county doesn’t provide service so I pay an annual subscription fee to Rural Metro for their fire protection service.
December 8th, 2011 at 3:56 pm
(This is going to be long. So long it probably shouldn’t be a comment, so I leave it up to Uncle to decide if it stays or not.)
They paid NO taxes for that fire department.
It isn’t their fire department.
It isn’t the local fire department.
It is the fire department of a town that happens to be near where they live.
A small, not particularly well off town at that. (3.1 square miles, Population only 2517, just 1081 households, PCI of $15,983 — 2000 census)
A fire department that only has 3 front line trucks. The webpage doesn’t have specifics, but the engines both look to be at least 30 years old, the pumper a bit newer.
It’s not South Fulton’s problem.
It’s the county’s problem.
The county’s problem: There is no county fire department. The county’s Mayor said they’d have to raise property taxes by 50% to pay for a fire department.
The people don’t want to pay it because they are getting too good a bargain now by virtually free-riding off of South Fulton.
The un-incorporated area that is offered protection by South Fulton is over 20 times the town’s land area and contains 900 households. Around 700 of those households pay the $75 annual fee. The $53K from those fees each year only covers about 1/4 of the cost of maintaining the fire department.
The area outside South Fulton generates almost 1/2 of the call volume for the FD.
South Fulton households pay almost 3 times that much per year, buried in their taxes.
That $75 is a bargain. An epic WOOT worthy bargain.
By way of comparison my local fire district taxes up here in CT are $350/yr, collected in addition to my property taxes. That’s for a 99% volunteer fire department with just a paid fire marshal/inspector and a paid mechanic.
People love to brag about the low taxes in unincorporated areas.
Reminds them of this next time they start bragging.
http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Community-concerned-about-reputation-after-pay-for-spray-135146313.html
ASIDE: My fire tax doesn’t even include the rescue ambulance that I volunteer on. It is run by a charitable association that is separate from the fire department, gets no tax money and survives on donations and on billing for services.
December 8th, 2011 at 6:46 pm
> In a libertarian world, you could sign a contract with the fire
> department to pay the COST of using the equipment and their time in
> fighting the fire when the arrive on the scene.
But who pays the firemen and for the fire trucks and equipment when there isn’t a fire? If no one pays, then they aren’t there to be called when there is a fire.
Maybe we should have a system to pay for a fire department, like everyone who knows their house is going to burn down forks over, say, $20,000 ahead of time.
Wait, what? No one knows if or when their house will burn down? And not everyone can afford that big a fee? Dang.
Well, since it’s basically a crap shoot whether your house or my house will burn down, and since it costs so damn much to fund a fire department, maybe everyone in the community should pitch in a little bit, and then we’ll have a fire department ready to help.
So, should we make that system insurance or taxation? Either way it’s effectively socialized, and if my house doesn’t burn down, shouldn’t I get my money back?
Well, no, because your money has been spent to keep the fire department ready and for helping put out other people’s fires.
That’s crap! I don’t want to pay for someone else’s fire!
Well, if you don’t, and everyone who thinks like you doesn’t, then not only will you not have a fire department, because you can’t afford to pay for it yourself, but other people’s houses will burn down because the few people who do pay into the socialized plan can’t afford all of it.
This is the basic tenet of society, and it’s the “comm” in “community” and its the “civil” in “civilization”. No man is an island unto himself. Selfishness not only screws over your neighbor, who you may or may not care about or want to help, but it also screws over you, too, “Mr. I don’t want to pay taxes… Oh no my house burned down cuz I wouldn’t pay for a fire department”.
December 8th, 2011 at 11:51 pm
Yup:
Make that $75 a subscription for one 911 call each year.
Double the cost to resubscribe if the subscriber makes a bullshit call.
The system there is working just fine. If someone wants to risk having their home burn down to save $75 a year, that’s fine by me.
December 9th, 2011 at 2:24 am
In a libertarian system, the fire department would be 100% privatized and you’d pay them a monthly service fee for emergency fire response protection, just like I pay for my AAA road service and privatized trash collection. You don’t dial 911, you dial your contracted fire fighting service. Your homeowner’s or renter’s insurance company would require you to provide annual proof of fire fighting service or else they would drop your fire coverage, and your landlord or mortgage company would require you to have that fire insurance coverage.
December 9th, 2011 at 3:19 am
This is the basic tenet of society, and it’s the “comm” in “community” and its the “civil” in “civilization”
That is the basic tenet of a certain kind of society, yes, one that arrogates moral sovereignty to itself, subordinating the choices of individuals to its own. Which type of society is that? It goes by many names, though one of the most famous examples also starts with “comm” — and that’s neither a coincidence nor an exaggeration.
I doubt you specifically intend to advocate that system, but it doesn’t really matter, practically or morally. The idea that society has the right to force choices on individuals, no matter how short the list of such exceptions to freedom may (initially) be or what the particular justification is, is the first step on a road well worn by the footsteps of prior travelers throughout history — a road which, no matter the fancied destinations of the travelers upon it, has but one logical and inexorable destination.
So, should we make that system insurance or taxation? Either way it’s effectively socialized, and if my house doesn’t burn down, shouldn’t I get my money back?
Here we see the sort of ideological confusion which explains why this sort of mind can never see where the road goes.
The difference being evaded here is that you can’t opt out of any “socialized” system. A system is “socialized” (in the meaning of “socialism”) when individuals are not free to opt out.
“Insurance”, by contrast, is voluntary; therefore it is by definition not “socialized”, but “capitalized” (as in capitalism). Insurance is essentially the process by which an individual chooses to pay another to assume a certain risk (because nobody knows whose house is going to burn down; that’s the point and meaning of “insurance”).
The difference is between leaving an individual free to make his own decision about the risk, versus some other individuals, via the device of “society”, overriding his judgment and forcing him to act as *they* see fit. Liberty versus coercion, in other words. Tellingly, the moral justification Yup uses to jettison our freedom of choice in dealing with fire risk, is the attack on “selfishness”. All assaults on liberty logically start from this basis in one form or another (“greed” is very popular now also.)
Even though it has been used as such throughout history, “selfishness” is not an exception to a man’s liberty, as much as Yup and others like him imagine it to be. It is not a “put him in jail free” card.
It’s a good thing too, given how conveniently elastic the meaning of that term plainly is here, as is evident in Yup’s glib assertion that to lose one’s house and possessions to fire is somehow in one’s self-interest (!).
I’ve got news for you, Yup: liberty necessarily means that others will think differently from you, and may make choices you don’t like as a result, even some “selfish” ones. If you don’t like it, that’s just TGDB.
I’d rather not have my liberty be subject to the whims of a mind that can’t be bothered to check the meanings of the words it uses against basic facts, to the point of completely flubbing the distinction between freedom and compulsion.
December 9th, 2011 at 10:46 pm
Seerak, your arguments contain the logical fallacy that a thing must always end up at some extreme derivation. It is not the case that helping someone out, even as a group or a whole society, must always cause the destruction of personal liberty and creation of tyrany. There is such thing as common good.
Your statement suggesting that “community” equals “communism” is absurd.
Your statement that, because insurance is voluntary, it is not socialized is wrong. Insurance, even in a free, capitalist market, is socialized because the insured people as a group (the “social” part) pay into a shared pot (also “social”) which is then drawn from by indiviuals when needed. Socialized means the many helping the few or shared risk, shared reward. I think you’re unclear on the meaning of socialized, as the word has nothing to do with choice or compulsion. It’s mis-used that way a lot though, so maybe that’s how you got it confused. Words have meanings. You can’t just re-define them at will.
I never asserted that losing one’s house in a fire is in one’s self interest.
You are right that liberty means tolerating others’ decisions that you may disagree with, but there are necessary limitations that even a libertarian would agree with, like don’t kill other people even if you assert that doing so is your personal liberty so TGDB for the person(s) you decided to kill.
Your arguments seem to assume that what one individual chooses to do has no effect on anyone else. The decisions that each of us make have an effect on the people around us. No matter how strongly you believe otherwise, you can not change this. If you exist, then you are affecting someone in some way. There is a huge range of these affects, from those that are impossible to measure to those that infringe on someone else’s life, liberty or pursuit of happiness. Your arguments imply that there is no middle ground between anarchy and tyrany, when in fact there is, and people agreeing on where in that middle ground we should be for the most good with the least harm is neither tyrany nor a slippery slope to tyrany, even if you happen to disagree.
December 10th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Yup, you are one confused individual.
Start (but certainly do not end) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics
then come back when you have a clue.
All government derives it’s just powers from the consent of the governed (hopefully that phase rings a bell with you.)
The people of that county, rather than consent to paying higher taxes in order to have their own fire department, have instead chosen to go it themselves.
Anyone who lives there, but does not like that arrangement is certainly free,/i> to move elsewhere. That someone did not, and suffered the consequences for their own freely made choices, is entirely just and your attemtps to argue otherwise are doomed to failure.
December 10th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Yep, I pay $50 a year. And I smile when I write out the check. The guys benefiting run towards fires while I run away. Worth every damn penney!