The "pay to spray" controversy

An interesting discussion over at The Corner about the pay to spray controversy. I've only quoted snippets from the arguments. Click on the links to read more details.

Firefighters watch as home burns to the ground:

OBION COUNTY, Tenn. - Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.

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.

Daniel Foster:

I have no problem with this kind of opt-in government in principle — especially in rural areas where individual need for government services and available infrastructure vary so widely. But forget the politics: what moral theory allows these firefighters (admittedly acting under orders) to watch this house burn to the ground when 1) they have already responded to the scene; 2) they have the means to stop it ready at hand; 3) they have a reasonable expectation to be compensated for their trouble?

The counterargument is, of course, that this kind of system only works if there are consequences for opting out. For the firefighters to have put out the blaze would have opened up a big moral hazard and generated a bunch of future free-riding — a lot like how the ban on denying coverage based on preexisting conditions, paired with penalties under the individual mandate that are lower than the going premiums, would lead to folks waiting until they got sick to buy insurance.

Kevin D. Williamson:

Dan, you are 100 percent wrong.

The situation is this: The city of South Fulton’s fire department, until a few years ago, would not respond to any fires outside of the city limits — which is to say, the city limited its jurisdiction to the city itself, and to city taxpayers. A reasonable position. Then, a few years ago, a fire broke out in a rural area that was not covered by the city fire department, and the city authorities felt bad about not being able to do anything to help. So they began to offer an opt-in service, for the very reasonable price of $75 a year. Which is to say: They greatly expanded the range of services they offer. The rural homeowners were, collectively, better off, rather than worse off. Before the opt-in program, they had no access to a fire department. Now they do.

Jonah Goldberg:

Why isn’t there a happy middle ground? You can pay 75 bucks upfront or, if you wait until your house is on fire, it will cost you, I dunno, $10,000? Lots of things work like this.

Here’s the more important part of the story, letting the house burn — while, I admit sad — will probably save more houses over the long haul. I know that if I opted out of the program before, I would be more likely to opt-in now. No solace to the homeowner, but an important lesson for compassionate conservatives like our own Dan Foster (Zing!). As Edmund Burke said, example is the school of mankind and he will learn from no other.

John Derbyshire:

Dan, Kevin: I am entirely with the South Fulton fire department here. In the terms of Nico Colchester’s great 1996 essay, they are being crunchy rather than soggy:

Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. . . . Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. . . . The richer a society becomes, the soggier its systems get. Light-switches no longer turn on or off: they dim.

One of the duties of conservatives in this soggy fallen world is to stand up for crunchiness. For the fire department to have extinguished the Cranicks’ fire would have been soggy, even aside from the considerable degree of sogginess it would have left on the property.

Daniel Foster:

Jonah, you know how to hit a guy where it hurts: deploying my precious Burke against me and calling me the dread double C-word. But notice, my argument isn’t about the wisdom of the policy, or of Mr. Cranick for not opting into it. It’s about what to do if you’re the fire chief sitting in front of the burning house.
...
I’m not convinced by Derb’s argument that the Cranick’s house should have been left to burn to teach us all a valuable lesson.

Daniel Foster:

Ton of e-mail on this Pay to Spray stuff. This one, from an ex first-responder is sensible even if I don’t fully buy it:

The city took a logical, if not well thought out, step toward fiscal responsibility and personal accountability.

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One more reader response, this one comes closest to convincing me that I’m a bleeding-heart nanny-state liberal (are there rehab programs for that sort of thing?):

So what he was really willing to offer was to pay reasonable costs. But he already had an opportunity to do the reasonable thing by signing up in advance, and declined. So why should anyone get outraged when he gets what’s coming to him? As far as I can see, the only plausible source of outrage was that he didn’t realize in advance how severe the penalty might be.

Kevin D. Williamson:

All this talk of fire departments reminds me of an important fact: Some of the best, fastest-moving, most dedicated, and most effective fire departments I’ve seen at work have been volunteer fire departments. But I suppose if you can’t be bothered to pay $75 to subscribe to the local firefighting service, then you surely cannot be bothered to set up a volunteer fire company in your county.

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite newspaper photos by the great Mike Mooney, one of my all-time favorite newspaper photographers: a volunteer firefighter in Lower Merion, Pa., rescues Oreo the cat from a house fire — just barely.

First, I must say that I have never seen a cat look that defeated. Most will fight to their deaths - even attacking their rescuers. That's happened to me twice and I will never rescue another cat.

Second, I posted this because I wanted to start a discussion with Chas and Andy about financially supporting our local volunteer rural fire dept.