Seems unfortunate in times of lack of supply of fireman that this is tolerated.
I’m fairly certain that fire retarding private lawns is not the most efficient use of resources considering the circumstances at the moment.
Read the article, they aren’t fire retarding private lawns. They are doing preventative work that keeps the fire far away. If it hits the lawn, it’s too late.
More firefighters are better, regardless of which areas are being contained with higher priority. If they were taking away fire fighters from the publicly funded groups or volunteers, then there would be something to bitch about.
What do you mean with that comparison? This would be quite a legitimate reason for complaining!
Morally, I think that the people who push for private security and firefighters are doing a net damage to society.
In other words, a state-provided service is not always perfectly on-time, but if I want to hire some private service with super-fast response time for my twenty million dollar beach-front property, why not? How does me hiring a private fireman _harm_ someone else? If anything, might it not reduce the load on public infrastructure?
Likewise, if you decide to throw all your garbage on a forest, it is neither positive nor negative. If it is only you who does that, it can be argued that its net effect is negligible, neither positive nor negative. Maybe a bit of purely aesthetic disgust for somebody who happens to walk by while you are throwing it. But that is all. If anything, it may reduce a little bit the load on public garbage collection.
Will 20 such private firemen be a problem? No, but 2,000? That would absolutely have an impact on available firefighters for the public.
The great thing about capitalism, for better or worse, but mostly better is that you or any one other person does not get to decide what constitutes efficient use of resources. Everyone decides that for themself based on self interest and the market ends up magically having this sort of collective intelligence that allocates far better than any alternative system ever has.
Step 2: The government can't afford firefighters.
Step 3: Rich people use the tax money they've saved to employ private firefighters to only protect their property.
Step 4: Poor people are left to die in otherwise controllable fires.
I'm sympathetic to #1 on a general level, many (though not all) rich people have lobbied for lower taxes, and/or simply employee tax experts who can take advantage of legal ways to reduce their taxes a great deal. But in this instance at least it doesn't work, California isn't low tax. And your progression further falls apart at #2 because firefighter salaries aren't at the level of "can't afford it" even for California alone, let alone the federal government. California looks to have around a $144 billion budget for the 2018-19 period, and I see from a quick search a Fortune article indicating they had allocated a $442 million firefighting budget, total (which apparently got exhausted, and importantly does represent a sharp upward trend from the previous 5 years, in 2013 they spent $242m). But while a few hundred million more is certainly a lot of money, it's not at the level where it's killing California. And again, California isn't a low tax state anyway.
So no, I don't think you're justified here, or at least you'll need more support. There could certainly be more spent from by the public on the level of expense private firefighters represent, and it's not clear that there is any zero sum game here. And I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with multiple levels of response, at the theater and local levels. That's particularly when part of it is preventative, like creating fire perimeters on properties by cutting down and removing dangerous vegetation. That doesn't require the same skills, expense or risk as direct large fire containment but can be a big help. Finally, as with floods there are arguably private properties that the public simply shouldn't be on the hook to defend at all because they're in known very dangerous areas. If someone wishes to expend their own surplus resources on it though that's no different than any other luxury expenditure is it?
It is reasonable to debate what balance budget should have in all this, and whether the government should be doing more to invest in better infrastructure up front. For example, from what I can tell from various sources like this one [1] a few billion a year would cover a significant amount of buried HVDC distribution backbone. California apparently has around 26000 miles of high voltage primary lines, and about 240k miles of secondary. Focusing on the primary first it'd probably cost a good $35-55 billion based on what I can find, which is a lot but is the sort of project to be done over time and focusing on the most important areas (going through high vegetation risk spots) first. It'd add up over a decade or two of effort, and blackouts aren't free either. And it might at least be worth it to look into whether there are any economies of scale to be gained or standardization and improvements that can be done to bring the cost down further. Or instead, perhaps it'd be more cost effective to just abandon certain parts of the state, some towns may face the same issue as coastal ones.
But I don't think the negative reaction to private individual efforts is justified either, and unnecessarily creates bad feelings not conducive to further work.
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1: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-...
Lobbying is a form of weak power by comparison.
There are more poor people than rich people so the poor people had to vote for those that lowered the taxes at the expense of the firefighting services, which in turn means that it cannot be that clear cut.
What if one person had enough resources to pay all firemen to not fight fires at all? The "collective intelligence" of the market has obvious blind spots.
That's exactly how pricing signals work. "Firemen" is not a fixed set of people.
As does the collective intelligence of the voters and the state. Whichever is more, and more consistently intelligent is apparently not obvious.
Intelligence does not imply perfection.
Show me the evidence this is happening.
Are you implying that there are open fireman positions that no one is applying for? If so your market is incredibly different from the one I know. Here in Australia a job as a fireman is very hard to get.