"Greatest minds of the 19th Century" - and 1st Century BC

Yahoo news turned up an interesting story for me tonight: the firefighters who deliberately allowed a house to burn down because the owner hadn't paid $75 fire protection.

This, apparently, has become a debating point about the relative merits of various forms of conservative capitalist ideologies:

Daniel Foster, a self-described "conservative with fairly libertarian leanings" who writes for the magazine, took issue with the county's laissez-faire approach to firefighting, calling it "a kind of government for which I would not sign up."

...

But Foster's colleague Kevin Williamson took the opposite view. ... "The South Fulton fire department is being treated as though it has done something wrong, rather than having gone out of its way to make services available to people who did not have them before. The world is full of jerks, freeloaders, and ingrates — and the problems they create for themselves are their own. These free-riders have no more right to South Fulton's firefighting services than people in Muleshoe, Texas, have to those of NYPD detectives."

...

"The case perfectly demonstrated conservative ideology, which is based around the idea of the on-your-own society and informs a policy agenda that primarily serves the well-off and privileged," Think Progress' Zaid Jilani wrote in a response to the National Review writers.

The interesting thing is that if we scale up this situation to a national level, certain curious elements become apparent: Mr. Williamson's "jerks, freeloaders, and ingrates" who refuse to pay the proper membership fee for the protections they wish to be afforded turn out to be the people who demand lower taxes and smaller government! Sure, if you're well-off and you worked hard to earn all that cash, you might feel "I worked hard, I should get to keep it!" but you only got to gain it by your hard work because there are protections afforded you (and everyone else) by the government, funded by tax. If you want to have a right to have laws protecting you; insurance if your hard-earned wealth is stolen, damaged or otherwise lost to you; soldiers or police to stop others from waltzing in and making off with it; education so you can figure out how to make more... ultimately, somewhere along the lines, you have to pay taxes, because taxes are what provide the stability to give you the opportunity to have all those things.

The people who argue against taxation, who argue for "small government", who argue against the welfare state (e.g. universal healthcare in the US!) are people who want to avoid paying the fire protection money, and yet still have the firefighters protect their home.

Unfortunately, I fear that Zaid Jilali's response may be typical of the liberal/progressive approach to the question, which focusses not on this underlying message about the intrinsic flaws in the "small government" argument, but instead of trying to score cheap emotive points that end up "preaching to the converted", so that no real debate occurs.

***

Having said that, I do love me some cheap emotive ad hominem stuff, too, so in that vein:

Another thought occurs to me, which is that I have heard of other, similar schemes in the past.

The most famous in modern culture will be the description in Gangs of New York of rival firefighting teams queuing up to earn the money for putting out a fire - but only if the owner of the burning building coughs up first! And if the firefighters fight each other over who gets the money, then that's an end to the building regardless!

Another similar set-up was Marcus Licinius Crassus' rise to power, which was based on a similar insurance policy - augmented by some seriously underhanded property dealing when uninsured property caught fire and he would buy it at its value as burnt rubble, then have his men put it out before it was reduced to that state!

The old saying that conservatives represent the best thinking of the 19th Century is a little optimistic when we take into account the similarities here with Crassus and his tactics, although as observed, there are parallels with certain 19th Century practices as well.

Modern conservative thinkers and proponents of laissez-faire capitalism would appear to think that Crassus simply hit upon a good business model (I can almost imagine the pitch in Dragons' Den now!) and the way they approach healthcare and medical insurance (as an example) really does seem to resemble the firefighting story told in Gangs of New York.

Their slogan should be - "Conservatism: because history looks so much better when you're living in it"