Libertarianism's price: your home in flames

Gene and Paulette Cranick watched everything they owned in the world, including their two dogs and a cat, literally burn to the ground last month, all for a lousy $75.

To top it off, the fire company was there to watch, not extinguish, the blaze.

The fire chief of the South Fulton, Tenn. adamantly refused to put out the fire, citing that the Cranicks were not on the list of property owners outside the city limits who paid the annual $75 fire protection fee.

The South Fulton Fire Company only provides service to those within the city limits or those who pay the fee.

The county does not provide any fire service whatsoever, leaving South Fulton with a natural monopoly on fire protection in Obion County.

The Cranicks claim to have been away in the past year, and as such, forgot to renew their protection insurance.

They lived on the same farm for 40 years, 21 of which were in the home that was consumed in the conflagration.

This isn’t the first time the Cranicks forgot to pay their fee.

Three years ago, the South Fulton Fire Company responded to a chimney fire despite the Cranicks’ lack of fire insurance and allowed them to pay the next day.

Paulette Cranick said she recognizes why the firemen obeyed their chief’s orders not to save the property.

“I understand they have families and need to protect their own jobs,” she said.

The problem with offering fire protection as an insurance mechanism is it might result in ethically concerning cases such as the Cranick incident.

It is important to provide compensation to firefighters in order to keep fire services running.

But fire protection is not, and should never be, a business or an insurance company. It is a public service that should be funded by tax dollars, not by an optional annual fee.

It is unwise to set up an essential service such as fire fighting as an insurance company.

Fire service should be set up as a collective good, where everyone has to pay, and everyone receives the service.The problems lies in that the free market doesn’t really work for essential services.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post agreed.

“We’re comfortable letting people make bad financial decisions when it comes to their television purchases, or the car they drive, or whom they date. We’re not willing to do it when the consequence is that they and their children quite literally die in a fire. But that’s what free-market firefighting would require.”

The South Fulton Fire Company was at the scene, with the proper equipment and the power to help.

They should have assisted the Cranicks simply out of goodwill.

It would not only have been the right thing to do, but it would be fulfilling a moral and civic responsibility.