This is not good for libertarians

I’m with Dan Foster, this just does not look good, no matter how you slice it:

Via WPSD-TV in Tennessee:

The Story:

OBION COUNTY, Tenn. – Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won’t respond, then watches it burn. That’s exactly what happened to a local family tonight.

A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late.  They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning.

Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton.  But the Cranicks did not pay.

The mayor said if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck.

This fire went on for hours because garden hoses just wouldn’t put it out. It wasn’t until that fire spread to a neighbor’s property, that anyone would respond.

Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.

“I thought they’d come out and put it out, even if you hadn’t paid your $75, but I was wrong,” said Gene Cranick.

Dan Foster writes:

That bolded paragraph is what really gets to me. I have no problem with this kind of opt-in government in principle — especially in rural areas where individual need for government services and available infrastructure vary so widely. But forget the politics: what moral theory allows these firefighters (admittedly acting under orders) to watch this house burn to the ground when 1) they have already responded to the scene; 2) they have the means to stop it ready at hand; 3) they have a reasonable expectation to be compensated for their trouble?

The counterargument is, of course, that this kind of system only works if there are consequences for opting out. For the firefighters to have put out the blaze would have opened up a big moral hazard and generated a bunch of future free-riding — a lot like how the ban on denying coverage based on preexisting conditions, paired with penalties under the individual mandate that are lower than the going premiums, would lead to folks waiting until they got sick to buy insurance.

But that analogy is not quite apt. Mr. Cranick, who has learned an incredibly expensive lesson about risk, wasn’t offering to pay the $75 fee. He was offering to pay whatever it cost to put out the fire. If an uninsured man confronted with the pressing need for a heart transplant offered to pay a year in back-premiums to an insurer to cover the operation, you’d be right to laugh at him. But imagine if that man broke out his check book to pay for the whole shebang, and hospital administrators denied him the procedure to teach him a lesson.

I’m a conservative with fairly libertarian leanings, but this is a kind of government for which I would not sign up.

I have agree with all of the above.  Conservatives believe in LIMITED Government, not no Government at all. This whole idea of “pay for protection” nonsense strikes me as some sort of mafia scheme.  Not only that, there is the moral argument of allowing a man’s house burn to the ground. This is why I am not a 100% libertarian, because libertarians; especially libertarian leftists — put principle before morality — and that my friends is wrong.   If were living in the town of Obion County, Tennessee; I would be demanding that the town abolish the stupid “pay to spray” rule and put in a more sensible way of paying for the city’s fire service, like maybe out of the city’s general fund; which is most likely being used to pay this idiotic mayor.

Again, no matter how you slice this one; it just looks horrible for the libertarian purists.