Never On Sunday

Want to know what the libertarian vision of paradise really looks like? Look no further than this report of a fire department refusing to extinguish a burning home over an unpaid $75 subscription: the Cranicks didn’t pay their $75 subscription for fire coverage, so firefighters were ordered not to extinguish the blaze, although they did put out a neighbor’s house when the fire spread across the property line.

Now, bleeding heart liberals are likely to be thinking something along the line of “Horrors! How could they be so heartless?” and perhaps they have a point, although it’s hard to see how they expect services to exist at all, much less service everyone, when payment is voluntary but service mandatory. Baby-killing arch-conservatives, however, are likely to be thinking something along the lines of, “Those are the breaks. The Cranicks didn’t pay for fire protection, so they deserved what they got,” and perhaps they have a point, though it is grounded on calculated cruelty and a presumption that there is no basic level of human rights whatsoever, that people are entitled only to whatever freedom and security they can afford. (Note that the article doesn’t indicate whether the Cranicks failed to pay as a choice to gouge the system of an easy $75 or because they live in abject poverty.) Personally, I lean toward the latter opinion in this case, on an unfounded presumption that the Cranicks could afford the $75 and refused to do their part to keep everyone safe; if so, they were quite literally willing to see the system fail for lack of funds, to see someone else’s house burn down in order to save a few bucks, and don’t deserve any pity.

The episode is a microcosm of the conflict between the socialist-progressive perspective, which holds that communities have a vested interest in compelling participation in institutions that protect whole communities, and the libertarian-anarchist perspective so popular these days in conservative circles. The house burning is a perfect metaphor for the health care debate, for example: socialists think a mandatory tax to support a single-payer plan, or mandatory insurance necessary to maintain a private corporate insurance system are justified, while libertarians can’t see any difference between that and a Stalinist state. The libertarian position, followed to its inevitable conclusion, would prefer people simply die in the streets rather than drain the system of a $20 antibiotic, just as they take a grim satisfaction in seeing a house burn over a $75 debt. Although I suspect that the only libertarians truly prepared to live that way are the wealthy few who can afford all they need personally; teabaggers and similar conservative rabble are more likely living in the same sort of fantasy world as Mr. Cranick, thinking somewhere in the back of their minds that we can all be protected free of cost: “I thought they’d come out and put it out, even if you hadn’t paid your $75, but I was wrong.” Just as a lot of teabaggers and similar conservative rabble don’t realize until it’s too late how readily a lightly-regulated insurance industry can cut them off just as soon as they actually need expensive treatment, or how much of their own service is subsidized by tax money, or how little coverage they really get in the free market environment they envision, or how little service one gets from an emergency clinic of last resort where imaginary welfare cheats are cured of cancer for free. Applying the metaphor to other safety nets—welfare, medicare, social security—is left as an exercise to the reader.

The South Fulton, TN, burning is not an isolated incident, either. As part of the conversation in which I learned of it, someone pointed me to this article on isolated towns in Idaho expecting fire coverage for which they do not pay taxes, and even individuals refusing to pay the bill for having their house saved.

In the horror of a burning home, or babies dying of malnutrition, or people dying of an easily treated infection, it’s easy to overlook a small but very salient point of this libertarian paradise: the unprotected home didn’t just burn down; in the process, it damaged the property of a neighbor who did pay his fee. (And you can bet those damages won’t be paid.) Likewise, people left to die in the gutters pass their diseases on to the insured before passing away and removing themselves from the sight of polite society. Children with brains starved for nourishment or education develop into criminals and low-wage drones and leave the entire country worse for it. This, then, is the libertarian vision for America: a pay-as-you-go system in which everyone is entitled to precisely as much privilege and security and basic human dignity as he personally can pay for, and not a scintilla more. Those who can’t are to be ignored; best they die out as quickly as possible so as to “reduce the surplus population,” though they’ll continue to be a drain (and a larger one) on society at large while they do. And when, inevitably, people cheat the system—$75 here, $15,000 there—the system will break down entirely, and even those who can pay into the system will be left to fend for themselves. Amid warlords and savages, if things break down far enough. But at least they won’t be taxed for it.

Perfect freedom at last!