Is one typically billed when you have the fire department arrive? I thought it was a public good.
These towns are required by federal law to provide school service to children within them, however, anything else like police, fire, and ambulance services are not required.
I think it's truly a shame that this has led to predatory practices by private companies who charge "fire insurance" rates of $500 a year, and charge exorbitant rates to people who might innocently dial 911 while their house is burning and don't have insurance.
For what it's worth, this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts), but if you get far enough into the poor rural southern states, it really is like a 3rd world country.
It does sound awful not to have access to fire service to someone like me who is used to it,* but then again, have the company done anything wrong by offering the service? Starting no company at all and offering no service at all would have been acceptable, right? I mean, that's what most of us do. Then, is there really anything wrong with offering people a service, even at a high price, if you don't take away any alternative they already had (which in this case would be to let the house burn)?
* I haven't actually ever used the service, but I count on that they will come if I call. I count on the fire department coming more than I do the police, because if there's a fire, other people's stuff and lives are on the line. When it's just about me, I'm not as sure that I am considered worth the cost. For the record, I'm in Europe.
They have great diversification. In some locations they have monopoly. If you need immediate help (you see or are member of accident, you have strong pain no matter where (head, teeth, back)) you have almost no choice. You are still calling emergency and/or paying to one pocket.
From one side, public hospital all very old and incredibly indebted, outdated medical devices, buildings are old and need renovation. Mentioned corp invested huge amount of money in renovation, improving environment and business process. People have better services and new private hospitals has very good financial health and level of customer services.
On the other hand, very sad thing is that public representatives are able only talk about nothing and perform reformation feasibility studies and studies about studies. They are not able to get needed public services to desired level. If private corps will own entire public health-care system this will be an issue. Charging for services will not limited at all. There is almost no competition in this area since have huge entry difficulties. And even someone would be able to get into competition with this shark corp. they simply buy him.
So while the company could (and should) have done more. The real issue is that there should be statewide clear policy and regulation that defines what standards (public / private) entities must meet if they provide these services. And I do image these would be stringent and complex.
Two, people tend to accumulate objects of sentimental value. Your great grandfather's watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFtHjV4c4uw) might be priceless to you and only worth $50 to an insurance company.
Both are actually, in some sense, the same thing. Both are costs which you will pay instead of your insurance company. Because they don't pay those costs, their assesments of the costs of a fire will be off. Thus they will let some houses burn which optimally, would not burn.
However, my underlying point was really that it does make rational sense to allow some houses to burn. We could put a fireman on every street, and we'd probably save a lot of houses, lives, and heirlooms. But that would prohibitively expensive. Instead, we have to engage in trade-offs, having cheaper fire protection at the cost of risking some houses, lives, and heirlooms.
Where are you getting your definition of rational? Are you saying you can assign a fair, total ordering of value to every thing?
But we'd still save more lives, houses, and heirlooms if we did put one on every street. Every additional kilometer between my house and the fire station increases the level of risk for my house. My point is: it's not binary: you have fire protection or you don't. You have varying degrees of fire protection quality with varying degrees of cost and you have pick the one you want.
> Where are you getting your definition of rational? Are you saying you can assign a fair, total ordering of value to every thing?
No, I certainly hold to the subjective theory of value which rejects the idea that there is an objective fair total ordering of value.
By rational, I mean its a decision that makes sense given your subjective valuation. You aren't going to reduce the risk as much as possible because that would be far too expensive. You are going to choose a level of risk that in your estimation trades off expensive and risk in an acceptable manner. That's subjective, and will vary from person to person, but no matter what your decision is, you will end up having some risk that you could have gotten rid of it, if you were willing to pay for it.
I want to be clear. Is this actually the question you're asking?
But in the case postulated above, you aren't paying the company to protect your house from fire. You are paying the company as an insurance company. Fire protection is just something they do in order to reduce their losses.
Also, it is not likely they would simply decide not to protect your house. It is more likely they would have fewer fire stations, older equipment, etc that puts your house at a higher risk then you prefer.
But my point really was: regardless of who does it, some houses will end burning because it was too expensive to save them.
Much of the interior of the US could be described as civilized...
I don't really understand this, although my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority.
As well as good old fashioned, 'fear of people with different values and culture than your own'
He starts off with "Wow! That must have be tough growing up as an Indian in Georgia! Those guys are so backward."
My friend replies "Actually, I had a great childhood. Never had any problems being Indian. Georgia is a great place to grow up."
Of course the guy from SF had never actually been to Georgia.
These are the same people who would bristle if you said something bad about people in another country and say "How do you know? You can't understand a place by reading about it in the newspaper."
If a person is considering ideas (especially political ideas) then they might view those ideas as being held by a person like themself. Some ideas are very easy to picture being held by a very similar person (e.g. spicy food), but the more complex the idea (e.g. Trexit) the more difficult it becomes to conceive of the mindset that the similar person would need to have in order to have reached the differing conclusion.
The key here is that it's not really about a differing mindset, so much as different circumstances that construct the differing mindset. This, I assert, is very difficult to account for completely without simply accepting all views at face value as both perfectly valid and a complete mystery, unknowable outside each person's mind.
As such, it is inconceivable to the person who thinks they understand both the issues at hand and the mind of the relevant populace to reach a conclusion that contradicts the logical consequences of the (broken) assumptions, and thus the conclusion is that the one who holds such opinions is an illogical dunce, and unacceptable in this rational age. In actuality the assumptions are broken in a subtle way such that it is easy to miss the leap made to broad-brush painting.
In non-urban areas, at least if there's no serious risk of wildfires, firefighting is clearly not a public good. If your farmhouse start to burn, it's not going to threaten anyone but you, and paying firefighters to save it doesn't benefit anyone but you.
And in a (rare?) case of economic theory working in practice too, that's what we often observe: Rural fire departments often require fees to be paid, and won't fight fires if you haven't paid up.
(That being said: Just because rural firefighting isn't a public good doesn't mean it shouldn't be communally funded out of general taxation. Lots of what governments spend their money on aren't actual public goods.)
Crassus won a reputation for himself as a soldier in Sulla's campaigns in Italy (83), but fell out of favour because of his excessive greed in purchasing estates at knock-down prices during Sulla's proscriptions of his political opponents. Another source of his wealth was buying up property at risk from fire very cheaply and only then putting his private fire brigade into action. Other sources of his wealth were mines, and his business buying slaves, training them, and then re-selling them. In these ways he came to own most of Rome and increased his fortune from 300 talents to 7100 talents.
(A talent of silver is approximately 32kg, worth about 9 years of labour, so 7,100 talents would represent some 63,000 years of labour income. Very rough modern equivalent, about $2 billion, based on labour.)
It's complicated. Unincorporated areas will often (depending on the state) leave firefighting to nearby municipalities, which will generally charge a periodic fee for coverage and bill property owners who do not pay the fee if/when they respond. Even some municipal corporations (e.g. towns, etc) do the same thing, though generally only in quite rural areas.
My impression is that it's generally pragmatic rather than ideological: most of us live in densely populated areas, but (in the US), most space is very sparsely populated.
If you choose to live in such a place, be prepared to be completely self sufficient.