If a resident owner does not pay a $75 fee for the house, the assumption is nothing in the house is worth more than the piece of mind the $75 fee gives.

I suspect the firemen went there to asses whether there was 1)a high degree of danger to lives of people and 2)uncontrolled spread of the fire.

If there were people in the house, they would have more than likely used their expertise voluntarily to extract those people from the flames. But a house is just a house, even with sentimental value. (My dad is a bit of a hoarder and literally has junk that he holds on to because of "sentimental value.")

All in all, the priorities of the fire department were on the straight.

Exactly. A lot of this 'firestorm' of outrage is urban-dwellers not understanding rural life, and the tradeoffs rural elected officials make (and have for decades) which match their local circumstances: low population density, no fire-hydrants, well-spaced housing, etc.

In Tennessee, it was a trash fire by the landowner's grandson that got out of hand. (So there was a third thing they had to do to lose their home: engage in a risky behavior without adequate preparation after declining the subscription coverage.) And yet it was probably a perfectly legal trash fire, in the unincorporated area where it happened. (I suspect the neighboring town outlaws such fires within its city limits.)

People who can't imagine it being reasonable to burn your own trash on your own land are also going to misinterpret the other civic service differentials in such places.

But nobody is suggesting they should have just put the fire out for free. They should have put the fire out and billed him a sum many times higher than what the insurance premium would have been. The idea of insurance is to cap your liability, not to be a precondition for receiving any assistance.

Where does that logic end? If I build a house in Paulville, TX ("a gated community consisting of 100% Ron Paul supporters" on unincorporated land in West Texas), is the fire department of Dell City, TX obligated to put out fires there? How does that make sense?

Assuming it's the nearest town and someone in Paulville begs them to do so at any price, yes. And then you hand them a fat bill and if they don't pay, enforce it via the court, something you seem not to have considered.

I am in no way suggesting that someone who is too cheap to buy a reasonable fee like $75 should get bailed out when they suddenly want in because their house is on fire, that's nothing more than rewarding irresponsibility. But it is not the only alternative to letting the house burn, a false dichotomy if ever I saw one.

There are two reasons to require that the FD respond if they can reasonably do so. One is economic; the limited damage and bill for extinguishing a fire might total to a $15,000 loss for the homeowner. If household earnings are $30,000/yr that's 6 months of work to pay it all back. But if the house burns to the ground, the loss is much higher; even in rural TN it's probably at least $75,000 up in smoke. That's a much bigger loss to the economy. Visualize it as a big bunch of dollar bills laid out along the ground, that starts burning from one end. I'm standing there with a bucket of water and you're offering me $5000 to put out the fire, which will leave the owner with 80% of the total, but I refuse and let it all burn because I'm still upset about your prior refusal to put down $75. Does that seem like a sensible policy? Am I somehow better off by your loss?

The other reason is legalist. The fire department has an effective monopoly on putting out fires, because only they have the necessary trucks and expertise. The homeowner didn't have the option of calling a competing fire department the way you would call a different cab company if the first one was unhelpful. Nor could one easily put out the fire oneself. In such a case, there's often a greater legal obligation to assist than usual.

Here, the fire department's non-action resulted in a much greater economic loss to the homeowner than if they had turned up and billed him. And they could have billed him, because a principle called quantum meruit means you can get a court to enforce payment for providing a necessary service even if no contract exists. Arguably, that extra economic loss, which only the fire department could have prevented, was intentionally inflicted. You can bet a case like that will go to court, and make the whole situation even more expensive.

I actually priced doublewides before posting earlier. It's not $75,000. In rural areas, you can get doublewides for under $20,000. A crappy one might go for as little as $15k list.

In any case: I simply can't get around the fact that we're talking about a guy who deliberately moved to a locale that didn't have fire service. I can't understand what moral obligation could require the fire department from another city to come to his aid. We're all hung up on the fact that the fire department "stood by" and "watched his house burn down". But it wasn't his fire department!

The dollar amount is irrelevant, it's the principle of whether there is some duty to act or not. By this I mean legal rather than moral duty. They're two different things, though you could say that there might be some moral duty towards the neighbors who are otherwise going to have to live next to a charred shell.

If the guy calls up the fire department and they say 'sorry, busy fighting fires in our own town,' then too bad, that's what he gets for living in the boonies. But if they can help, and they are the only ones who can help, but they don't, it's a totally different situation. In those cases where they turn up and just watch, it's worse than not turning up at all.

For all we know they may have done this in the past and nobody ever paid. I mean, they didn't pay $75 a year and now they have a damaged house... seems like a good chance they won't pay afterwards when the amount is a lot higher.

It isn't like they allowed people to die in the fire, it was just a house. Just like if you wreck your car without coverage, you will be the one paying for it.

In the end, I'm sure this isn't easy for the firefighters (as the linked article mentions), but they have to make sure they provide the best service they can to those who they serve (their own town).

Then you sue, and the court places a lien on their house/earnings/assets. You'll be able to collect sooner or later, even after bankruptcy in many cases.

A truly private fire service might have been able to strike some rapid deal for an amount somewhere between their costs-to-respond and the expected remaining-value-to-be-saved.

But, it was a city fire service, unmotivated by profit, risk-averse, and bound by inflexible bureaucratic rules.

In either case, negotiating a reasonable price balancing all the factors after the fire has started is so much more difficult to do in an equitable manner that I can understand why either municipal or purely-private fire companies might avoid doing so, on principle.

Also, given the rural setting, it's probable there were no water mains/hydrants nearby and some limited-number of tank trucks were covering a large area. Using any would mean less service for prepaid subscribers; for example any gallon deployed to save Cranick's house wouldn't be available to prevent the flames from spreading to the subscribing neighbor's yard.

With such difficult tradeoffs, and sitting at my keyboard thousands of miles away with a mixture of incomplete summary reports and perfect hindsight, I prefer to assume that the local responders were neither idiots nor heartless but did the best within the constraints they knew.

Yes.

(And it's funny how the American's have bent the word liberal to mean something closer to social democrat.)

If only "liberal" meant anything that specific, in practice. "Conservative" and "liberal" are both ridiculously bent terms in the US, reduced to meaning nothing more than "What Republicans want" and "What Democrats want". In practice, these aren't really all that different sets of demands - it's simply the propaganda of the Democrats to construe Republicans as militaristic psuedo-libertarians and the propaganda of the Republicans to construe Democrats as pacifistic psuedo-socialists.

For what it's worth, I want what Democrats want: a strong public school system with centralized governance, national single-payer health care, legal protection for labor unions (I'm a fan of the 8-hour work day), a progressive tax system to pay for it, and the maximum possible business-friendliness obtainable given those constraints.

And if you thought the majority of Republicans didn't want the same thing on all those points, within some wiggle-room on definitions and chauvinism over which party's policies to do roughly the same thing are better...well, you'd be surprised talking to them, then.

Likewise, you and most other Democrats would probably go, "Hell, we want that, too!" if a Republican listed off eir concerns about national security, countering terrorism, balancing the budget, reducing waste, etc.

And when the rubber hits the road, even fewer differences come up. The Republicans never carried out their boast of dismantling the Department of Education back in the 90s; by 2000, Bush ran on the promise of further centralizing education and enlarging the DoE, both of which he did. Republicans acted as if Obama was going to cut and run in Iraq and Afghanistan, if it didn't turn out to be possible to simply surrender to Al Queda; this has, to say the very least, not happened.

I'd be surprised to hear that Patrick McKenzie believes in a strong public school system with centralized control, protection for labor unions, or single-payer health care.

I'd be very surprised if the Republican party and its voting base were made up of Patrick McKenzie - or even people who agreed with him on every issue.

The blunt fact is that both parties are, in American terms, very, very centrist. If the supporters of either party significantly resembled the outliers that supporters of the other party use as stereotypes, American politics would be wildly different from what it actually is.

The self-identified Republicans I am acquainted with are not looking to meet in the middle on these three issues. They believe in private schools, a free market for labor with no protection for unions, and a system of private and deregulated health insurance.

I don't think these are inherently bad ideas, either; I just don't agree with them.

(For what it's worth, I believe in a strong social safety net, and I don't believe we should plow money from the federal budget into the stock market, but I could go either way on the specifics of Social Security).

Think about that for a second: if roughly half of this country actually felt the same way on all those issues, how could Bush have run on spending more on public schools and placing them under greater federal control, how would we have the many thousands of labor-protection laws we have, and why would we still have things like Medicare and Medicaid, just to start with?

They don't. Your acquaintances are rather staunch outliers to hold those positions.

Because incoming administrations/Congresses (Congressii?) do not begin with a clean slate, for one thing; and also because many congressional procedures require a supermajority, particularly in the senate.

I agree that there are more moderates than fringe thinkers in both parties, but the fringe thinkers tend to make things more rather than less partisan and the moderates are not much good at telling them to go fly a kite. So this year the Republican House candidates are claiming they'll abolish the Department of Education if they win - likely an empty boast, but to me it's exasperating that the idea is even up for discussion.

Edit: Democrats' fetish for burying small businesses in paperwork is equally exasperating to me.

Republicans have no less a fetish, in practice.

Just as in practice, Republicans have no interest in the abolishing of the DoE, chest-beating silliness aside. Fringers say a lot of things and some pols might try to appeal to them, but at the end of the day, it's what the mainstream wants - in both parties - that rules. Some larger groups may have occasional influence, but only when they can convince other people (at least temporarily) that they are right.

I seriously don't care about this horse-race analysis (well, I do, in the same sense as my dad cares about the Bears season). It has nothing to do with what I said.

You're missing what I'm saying. It's not about "horse-race analysis", it's about acknowledging that the mainstreams and actual actions of both parties are not anywhere as far apart as various outliers are - or that the propaganda of each group would try to claim.

Yes. Although Social Democracy isn't a very specific terms in countries where it's in active use, either.