When silly laws benefit no one
ABC News reports that firefighters in the Tennessee city of South Fulton buying viagra online
news.com/US/tennessee-familys-home-burns-ground-firefighters-stand-watch/story?id=11806407″>refused to put out a fire because of the family’s failure to pay a $75 annual fee for rural fire protection services (the family lived outside of city limits, so the fee was in place of normal city taxes). The firefighters were obligated by law not to put out the fire absent the payment of the fee. Was this justified?
The argument in favor of user fees is that they eliminate problems of free-riding by attaching costs to services. As Jacqueline Byers of the National Association of Counties put it, “If the city starts fighting fires in the homes
of people outside the city who don’t pay, why would anyone pay?”
But because of the way the policy in South Fulton was constructed, a family lost decades’ worth of possessions while the city and fire department were embarrassed nationally. It would have been a simple matter to have surcharged the family after the fact. Many emergency services, such as ambulances, operate on a basis of billing after the fact. In fact, the family offered to pay $500 to fire fighters who arrived to protect a neighbor’s house.
It is not unreasonable to charge people for services; there are, after all, no free lunches. But for firefighters to let a house burn down over a small sum of money makes little sense.
-Charles
Photo by Flickr user latitudes used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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2 Responses to “When silly laws benefit no one”
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No matter how much said family paid, it would lead to further non-payment of the fee (why buy insurance when you can get the same service on an as-needed basis?); the end result is that there would be no fire department at all. This rural Tennessee family probably did everyone in that area a favor – I suspect payment rates will approach 100% in the next cycle, the department will have more money to spend on additional firefighters or equipment, etc.
Then how do you explain the persistence of any service that operates on the basis of charging or invoicing after the fact? And besides, we can phrase the question “why pay a huge surcharge when you can pay much less for insurance?” You simply can’t say that non-payment would increase “no matter how much.” I suspect that if the surcharge were, say, $10,000 very few people would knowingly avoid the $75 fee.
Suppose you live in a neighborhood for 20 years, and interest rates are 2%. 20 years of fire protection has a present value of about $1300. We could tweak the numbers accordingly for different lengths of time stayed, but there is always going to be a level at which people would rather pay the insurance than the surcharge.