9 thoughts on “Libertarian wet dream”

  1. Perfect title. I wonder what the homeowners insurance company is going to say, that is, supposing they had insurance. $75.00 a year! {shaking head}

  2. Heh, PurpleGirl, your reaction was the same as mine: I’d just typed my cmment when I looked up, read your comment.

    I wonder how the homeower’s insurance company will handle this claim — refuse to pay bcz the guy hadn’t paid the $75?

    And I can’t imagine how the neighbors felt, as the firemen stood by to wait for their houses to catch fire!

  4. The firefighters that refused to help this man are employed by the *state*. They are not a market organization. The state does not respond to market incentives like a higher fee for last-minute service. Market organizations do.

    Libertarians are in favor of market organizations being allowed to provide services with free and open competition. I am a libertarian and I am definitely not in favor of a state-run fire brigade such as this and I find it utterly stupid that they wouldn’t save his house and send him a bill afterwards. If I ran a fire brigade, that’s what I would do.

    Thus, if this is anyone’s wet dream, it’s an authoritarian’s. Authoritarians like to have monopolies and like zero-tolerance policies like this fire brigade’s. Buy our service the way we say, or you get nothing. All or nothing. That’s dumb. That’s the state.

  6. Actually this is a throwback to the late 1800s where fire protection was provided privately by insurance companies. If your house didn’t have a sign in front from the insurance company, privately employed firefighters would just let your house burn.

    America is rushing headlong into a very Dark Age.

  7. i didn’t pay my aggressive war fee, but they went ahead and blew up a bunch of brown people anyway.

    these statists are cocksuckers.

    the bad kind.

  8. #4 Donnelly is right.

    Its difficult to come to the right conclusion if one starts with the wrong premise.

    This was classical government failure, not market failure. These firefighters were government bureaucrats for whom doing as little as possible, by the book, and ignoring both profits and morality, were the drivers. Private firefighters would have put out the fire in a jiffy for a tidy profit, given that most of their costs are fixed. A reasonable price, say $10k, would have been a great deal for Cranick too. A for-profit company would have a strong incentive to keep the cost reasonable, since reputation is critical for private companies not backed by government coercion.

    I am amazed that no major media has accurately reflected the basic elements of this case – that these firefighters did NOT operate on a private, for-profit basis.

  9. I must be missing a couple things:

    1. When did George Donnelly open up a fire protection service, or know anything about operating one efficiently? If I were operating a fire service that relied on prescription service as a means of securing consistent income, I might find it necessary to let a house burn every now and then to serve as an example. That’d solve the free rider problem. Another 100 houses paying $75 a year in service fees, knowing that their house will burn if they don’t, comes out to far more than $10k in the long run.

    2. As for the market competition issue, I’m unaware of any Tennessee statutes that make private fire protection services illegal. Apparently, a market for competing service wasn’t lucrative enough for a competitor to enter the market. That might be difficult for someone like George Donnelly to understand, given that virtually all of his activism intentionally co-opts the work of other libertarians. In fact, he cites it specifically.

    “The FSP isn’t just for minarchists anymore. It’s also ripe for anarchist co-option.”
    and
    “The Alternatives Expo is going on its fourth year of giving the Liberty Forum a run for its money”
    (note: The AltExpo piggybacks itself onto the already established Liberty Forum in order to inflate attendance)
    http://georgedonnelly.com/agorism/free-state-project-anarchists

    Sure, it doesn’t violate the sacred tenants of anarchism, but it’s certainly a douche move.

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