And a man who won't pay up $75, will he pay thousands once you've already put the fire out?
Some search-and-rescue services (I believe in Norway, for one set of examples) have a nominal, voluntary fee that hikers and skiers can opt to pay or not. If payers need rescue, they don't have to pay anything beyond that original fee. If non-payers get rescued, they get a big bill for search helicopter fuel, labor, etc. spent in looking for them.
Something like that seems sensible to me - if the guy had said, "Yes, please put out my house, I'm aware you'll bill me,", maybe signing a waiver or whatever to prevent problems with the firefighters' insurance company, then the firefighters could try to save his house and then the city could bill him, then sue him or garnish his wages, etc. if he refused to pay.
Since they're able to constitute these drastic "watch it burn" policies by fiat, why not have a policy entitling the fire department to your car, luxury items, a portion of your income or some of your property if and only if they save your house when you're without policy?
If you have seen drunks and problem gamblers, you would know that not all people are equally responsible. It would be better for society, as a whole, if fees were taken from them in small portions, and put to service when and where they're needed.
Serves the American public right though. They're well versed in toy, divisive issues of "morality", but they're ignorant of laws that affect their lives everyday.
And what responsibility do the 300 million members of the "American public" have to know the firefighting policies of some county in Tennessee?
What we have here is a crew of GOP politicians who came to power on biblical and national issues; having been financed and propped up by their regional and state offices. The people there, like most everywhere else in the U.S., vote in lock step with their "traditional" parties, for/against issues than don't relate to them on a daily basis.
People will happily vote against their own self-interest because they're under-informed, and held emotionally captive by politicians who invoke moral and religious argument to further their agenda.
Did these people choose to have a dysfunctional fire department? No. They chose less taxes, and smaller government. The GOP, instead of thinking of what's best for the people, decided to stick by their philosophical guns and deprived people of functioning infrastructure.
I will grant you that specific house was outside their taxed jurisdiction. But then comes the next argument: why hasn't the state stepped forward to help its remote citizens? Why hasn't the state of Tennessee dictated a policy of full, state-wide coverage for fire and rescue services for people in remote areas? What's philosophically unacceptable about a state dictating to its cities and towns that they need to support those satellite households? If not, why hasn't the state collected fees from those households to insure them?
Get my drift?
When a gang of politicians has free reign to act out its wildest political fantasies and govern by its most idealized rules, well, shit tends to happen. This is what I meant by "maintaining intellectual consistency". It wouldn't harm ONE TN politician to tax people in remote areas, not ONE. But they chose not to.
Yes. The people of that county have allowed multiple attempts to set up county-wide firefighting services to fail. They've preferred fee-based out-of-area services from a city that has never had any authority to tax them.
There's no "smaller government" aspect here, there's no conspiratorial back-room change by the GOP. There's just bizarre, partisan axe-grinding by people seizing on a lurid story.
Even the american healthcare system people lets people pay for treatment if they don't have insurance. After the fact. This is what the courts exist for.
Not allowing someone to pay because there's a possibility they might default is completely ridiculous. Should we close all the restaurants now, too?
And sadly, no - if you're a homeless person and walk into most hospitals with cancer, you'll get some painkillers if you need them (before being sent on your way), not a walk to the oncology ward.
You get the cost of providing the service back, he still has a house. Allowing the dwelling to burn to the ground just results in a destruction of wealth for zero gain.
That policy means that you can't afford to have a fire crew. The marginal cost associated with putting out fires is a small fraction of the cost of having a fire department.
> And if he doesn't pay, you sue him.
And you lose because contracts under duress are unenforceable.
And you lose because contracts under duress are unenforceable.
It's not so simple. Duress is where someone forces another into a bad position, eg by setting the house on fire first. A contract made under necessity (where the house is already on fire) will probably stand, unless it's for some wildly disproportional amount.
But in any case, a contract is not always required. In cases where one party knowingly accepts the beneficial services of another, they can be billed for it as if a contract existed.
Duress only implies impaired judgment of the contract signer as due to immediate fear; it doesn’t imply the other party created the situation. Any lawyer would easily argue that the fire department charged an irrationally high cost for fire fighting that the home owner wouldn’t have agreed to had they had time to fully weight the cost and benefits of fire fighting services. In the worst case, one only need say they planned to demolish the house in the near future and therefore paying to have the fire extinguished was irrational.
A contract for non-insurance, pay-for-use fire fighting would only be enforceable if signed before the fact.