@pre My read is that rural fire protection really should be offered on a community basis. How that occurs ... might vary.

• There could be a rural volunteer fire department, with dedicated equipment and volunteer responders, some of whom would be on call at any time, others might respond to larger incidents. This is fairly common. It spares some of the expense of a professional force, but avoids the pitfalls of no coverage at all.

• There could be a state-wide pact for mutual aid. This seems to be how most western states within the US operate, where what's a small fire at 10 am might be a massive conflagration by noon, and where activities such as mowing and brush-clearing are limited because sparks from cutting blades can and have sparked massive, town-destroying wildfires. I'm personally aware of two major California blazes, one sparked by a man (illegaly) mowing acreage where the blade sparked against rock, another in which an automobile had a flat tire and the rim scraping along the road sparked a fire. Both were immense. Both were near Redding, in the northern Sacramento Valley. How costs are shared under such schemes I'm not sure. (Good question for further research.)

• The city fire department could contract specifically with the county for fire services at the county level. All county residents would pay based on services rendered, but at a specified rate. This is a classic risk-sharing / risk-spreading role. It isn't a direct fee-for-service model, but should avoid the deadweight losses associated with the present model.

What's obvious though is that the strongly-libertarian mode presently applied ... has tragic outcomes which could be easily overcome.

Given that, my suggestion would be not to move there. Short-sighted, spiteful people do short-sighted, spiteful things. And pay a high price for it.

@gedvondur #insurance #fireDepartments #libertarianism #risk #coercion #MarketFailures #tennessee #AntiGovernmentIdiocy

2/end/

@pre Fires, like pollution and disease, have a strong tendency to not respect borders.

Looking at the Twitter thread, and past the invective, there are a few elements that stand out:

• There's no community-supported general rural fire protection covering this property specifically.

• The local city fire department, tax-supported by the city, offers additional protection coverage outside its primary area of service, but only on a subscription basis.

• As noted with both this story and the Crassus history, there are some severe market failures associated with this sort of risk management practice. It's often been noted that large governments (e.g., the United States) are budgetarily an insurance provider (SSI, Medicare, FEMA) with a military appendage. That's pithy, but also suggests a possible underlying truth: that insurance services may be far better supplied by governmental than private institutions.

On that last point, my podcast listening has given me a few author-interviews covering the insurance industry, and how it came to be privately-provisioned. To say the least, it wasn't an obvious option, and isn't a good fit.

Questions include how the situation might be better settled.

@gedvondur

#insurance #fireDepartments #libertarianism #risk #coercion #MarketFailures #tennessee #AntiGovernmentIdiocy

1/