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| The real guilty party. |
I thought they’d come out and put it out, even if you hadn’t paid your $75, but I was wrong.They did respond to calls from a paying neighbor.
This was a really thought provoking article for me. If I were calling the shots at the fire department, I probably would have put the fire out anyway, thus validating Cranick's attempt to be a free-rider supported by the payments of his neighbors. It's not OK to let people's homes burn. But if I were in charge of investigating the fire department, as you know had to happen, I'd probably not accuse them of any wrongdoing. They fulfilled their contracted duty.
The author of the article, Daniel Foster, sees this as a pretty good argument for providing fire-fighting services to anyone in the jurisdiction, and just charging them through a tax (that is, nobody gets to opt out). In one sense I tend to agree, but that left me wondering how this was different from the Obama Health Care plan, which I don't like. After talking it over with my wife (who has better economics instincts than I do, despite never having taken a class on the subject), we concluded that the main difference is that there is nobody else offering to put out fires; if you wanted to use another service to put out fires, too bad, there's nobody. No amount of money is going to be enough to get someone else to provide fire-fighting services. That's not true when it comes to doctor's office visits, checkups, and prescription drug provision. Now, if Obama had proposed a plan for universal catastrophic health insurance (with correspondingly high deductible), then it would be a lot more like public provision of fire departments. I might be OK with that health insurance system, too.
But what this really got me wondering about was Cranick's homeowner's insurance. Do they have to pay out despite the fact that he could have gotten fire-fighting protection, but didn't? How can you even get homeowner's insurance on a house that isn't covered by the local fire department? If I'm the insurance company, I probably wouldn't sell to a guy who won't join the local fire department club, no matter how much he tries to reassure me "oh, they'll come anyway, trust me." They don't make premiums high enough for that kind of nonsense.
On the other hand, might Cranick be able to argue that he offered to pay them the cost of fighting the fire ex post, and they refused? Could he say it's really their fault everything he had burned to cinders? I suspect this wouldn't fly, but I really don't know.
The gist is, I guess, that I don't agree with the fire department's call, but I'm having trouble drumming up sympathy for someone victimized by his own poor choices. Not too much of a surprise, I guess, since we've learned years ago from Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom (via Freakanomics coauthor Stephen Dubner) that economists are evil.
David Henderson offers a libertarian response here. Tyler Cowen is not moved.
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Your comparison of Health Care reform and the Fire department analogy got me thinking about something that my wife (also with excellent economic sense) said when she read about the Fire departments response. She said: “ If I were the neighbor, (who had paid) I would have been yelling and screaming about allowing the fire to burn nearby. It creates an unnecessary risk and could spread easily.” It became obvious to me that the fire response might have been much different if there was a major risk to the whole town (who had paid with taxes) by allowing the fire to continue.
Continuing the analogy to health care reform, most of the goal of government in health care reform is 1. To lower the cost, GDP outlay, of health care so that more people can afford it and 2. By doing so create a healthier and happier society. If you choose not to have health insurance or seek health care you end up (on fire) in the emergency room and you create a free rider cost to the rest of us (the fire department, hospital, is required to help you). Also by not using preventative care, non-insured individuals create excessive costs with complicated and difficult health solutions. (The neighbor in my now weakening analogy) Finally the financial risk of a non-insured unit (person or family) is often spread to the wider community because it bankrupts them and forces the hospital that treats them to go unpaid (sometimes the government steps into to help here). It seems to me that simply putting out all the fires makes sense. To do that you have to use community resources (taxes).
Health Care reform works best when it focuses not on catastrophic insurance, but on preventative care and the efficient treatment of chronic conditions. This is both the most moral choice (improving peoples quality of life), and also likely the most long run economically efficient solution (preventing catastrophic health failures). End of life care, which is often confused with catastrophic health insurance, is a different matter entirely and one that I’m not ready to debate.
Oh and thanks for taking my call.
Three thoughts:
1) it seems like the homeowner knew the terms and was trying to freeload. Well, is it worth having terms at all if you're going to ignore them for the sake of being friendly? also, it was a house that burned - a bunch of stuff. It's not like his kids were in there. So he was trying to be a cheapskate, and lost some money as a result - what's the big deal?
2) his offer ex post facto would almost certainly have been unenforceable: his home was burning, obviously the offer was made under duress.
3) firefighting being supported by taxes is a pretty good idea. but then again this department was; just the taxes came from a city twenty minutes away. Oh, and the county in which this happened decided they didn't want to put their tax dollars towards a proper fire service.
1) My only comments here are that several animals did die in the fire for some that in and of itself is an unnecessary crultey.
I personally would have felt an overwhelming moral obligation to assist if I was a neighbor, firefighter, or even stranger. Thus the conflagration of morality and economics.
The big deal? Moral Requirement.
2) no comment
3) Do we not expect that public firefighting should be a part of basic democracy? Like public police protection or public schooling? The question in the county is that those who could afford the fee have denied proper fire protection to those that could not.
What if the fee was really $7,500 per year? For some $75 is as much as $7500 to others. Again to me this is as much a moral question as an economics question.
I think there's an issue of assymetric knowledge when we compare the fire department with health care.
With the fire department, it's fairly easy to empirically verify that you received what you paid for. With health care it's not as clear. In poor neighborhoods in the US and in developing countries I see all sorts of pseudo-scientific "medicines" being sold.
I'm not sure I follow: my understanding was the fellow could pay (honestly, what homeowner can't afford seventy-five bucks? I'm a grad student with a family and I can afford that), but decided not to. So now the question is, if we have decided to let people behave foolishly (eg, not pay a trifling fee to avoid a major disaster), are we willing to let them suffer the consequences as well? The moral responsibility in this case is, to my way of thinking, primarily his.
There may be a secondary level of "good samaritan" responsibility to help out those in need, and I grant that the firefighters *may* have violated that. But if you find yourself in a pickle of your own devising, whether or not other people go above and beyond the call of duty to get you out of it seems like not entirely the point.
I would also - speaking personally - be somewhat ashamed to ask a man to risk his life for an animal. I also dislike public schooling, for whatever that's worth. But yeah, sure, for whatever it may be worth, I think firefighting is a public good and we should fund it with tax dollars. But we live in something approaching a democracy, and the county in which this fellow lived felt (and voted) otherwise.
I think the real subtext here is "are we willing to treat people like grown-ups?"
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