This reminds me of when I learned there was no such thing as "The Children's Crusade".
As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was an incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few. There's no way anyone was going to waste it on young, inexperienced children".
Nearly every source we had saying that the crusade involved children came much later, after a few writers referred to the same source with a mistranslation (think reading "me and the boys" as referring to actual children).
But people spent 500 years discussing the horrors of the children's crusade without ever really questioning if it happened.
> As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was an incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few. There's no way anyone was going to waste it on young, inexperienced children".
While a Crusade made up primarily of children is not realistic. The 'People's Crusade' was a thing. During the first Crusade 40 thousand or so poor peasants and various religious fanatics including many women and children departed Northern France a couple of months before the 'proper' army left.
It wasn't pretty. Along the way they murdered thousands of Jews, sacked or attempted to sack multiple cities and most of those who survived the journey were eventually massacred by the Turks (according to some that's one of the reasons why the Turks were so ill prepared when the actual Crusader army arrived, they expected that all westerners were poorly armed, disorganized and had no understanding or proper warfare... )
It is really weird reading this, it makes me realize that motivations and rationalizations of people who joined Jan 6 and similar events are really nothing new under the sun.
The motivations of people who joined Jan 6 are very simple: they thought they had been disenfranchised because of unprecedented anomalies during vote counting on election day, which their opposition made no effort to explain.
In one case a collection of votes was delivered that contained over 400k votes for Biden and zero votes for Trump or the independent candidates. That is incredibly improbable verging on statistically impossible even if 99% of those mail-in voters supported Biden.
Why is the opposition to blame on this? There were dozens of articles written to explain the effect. Contrary-wise, why didn't their leaders explain the "unprecedented anomalies" themselves?
IIRC, the Children’s Crusade never made it to the Holy Land. Instead they ended up a port in Europe where some “friendly” people offered to take them to the Holy Land on their ships for free. Turns out they were slavers and the children were taken to Northern Africa and sold as slaves.
This story sounds actually plausible as it may not be that far from where the children started to a port city.
The Wikipedia article mentions that also, but only after one of the children who apparently had visions from God and said the Mediterranean Sea would part into two and leave a path (sort of like the Red Sea for Moses) for them to march directly to the Holy Land...when that failed they settled on hitching a ride on ships from people who turned out to be slavers.
Well obviously the taliban aint real either. A mountainous area, in eternal intertribal warfare.. not actually accepting the nation state.. ridiculous thought.
This was the reality on the ground, even up until the 2nd worldwar.
The only escape for the peasants and althose 2nd,3rd sons who were bound to the land, was to go on pilgrimages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrimage or to flee to the "new world" were the nicer frontier awaited them.
I find the idea of a children crusadd very plausible. The crusader knights surely promised the conquered lands to peasants who would follow them. And pre-pestilence europe was certainly crowded.
Idealism is nice. Success self hypnosis is nice. But not believing in the brutality of bygone reality, while some parts of it are still around you, is foolish, and spreading that foolishness, is preparing for it to repeat itself. Work hard and meaningful, if not for yourselves, then to prevent the return of the olden times.
What do Junkers in Prussia have to do with the Hessian mercenaries who fought in the war of independence?
It was Frederick II who leased the army of Hesse-Kassel to the British. He was not some random indebted aristocrat but rather the ruler of a sovereign state. The soldiers were 'professionals' who volunteered and were paid a salary. Not (as you make it sound) random peasants conscripts sold off to pay of some debts.
> This was the reality on the ground, even up until the 2nd worldwar.
> The only escape for the peasants and althose 2nd,3rd sons who were bound to the land, was to go on pilgrimages
Yes. The only escape for peasants in the 1800's to 1930s was to go on pilgrimages.
In any case middle or upperclass people were more likely to go on pilgrimages than peasants (proportionally) even during the middle ages. Any long journey was prohibitively expensive for most people to afford.
> The crusader knights surely promised the conquered lands to peasants who would follow them
Generally crusader knights, especially the nobles were not too keen about taking thousands of untrained peasants who have to be fed and supplied with other provisions by someone on Crusades without providing anything in return. Generally various unorthodox/anti-establishment religious preachers like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Hermit) were the instigators of most 'popular' crusades.
They were ussually opposed by the nobility, the clergy and the bourgeoisie. For instance Shepherds Crusades of 1251 and 1320.
Read the Kantonspflicht part. They were drafted peasants.
>Yes. The only escape for peasants in the 1800's to >1930s was to go on pilgrimages.
Read old newspapers and alamanachs. They regularly locked vagabunds up into workhouses and the "euthanization" in the camps starting 1930 was just a continuation of that policy. Religous pilgrimage, entering servitude (sailor on ships etc.) or being rich was the only way to be able to migrate over long distances.Of course there were the usual religous purges, which pushed parts of the population to migrate to "safe havens" in the local klein-staaterei.
>The crusader knights surely promised the conquered lands to peasants who would follow them
I was wrong there. It was mostly greek-orthodox and armeniens. If you read the sources, the whole crusade affairs were a mess, regularly bogging down in local warfare and criminal activity along the road.
Check out the Wikipedia page to get a summary of the children’s crusade if you haven’t already. It was more akin to a religious-revival/evangelist movement than a military expedition afaict. Still your point stands, very plausible for young teens to be heavily involved in such things.
Wouldn’t children be useful in terms of doing a bunch of tasks that aren’t worth the time of your soldiers? Ie what was the age of the squires for the soldiers?
A squire would generally be between the ages of 14 to 21. A pre-teen boy wouldn't be useful for the core duties of a squire because of a lack of strength for the physical labor involved in handling arms, armor and horses.
Prior to the modern era, the Royal Navy and others had boys sometimes 12 or younger on ships as servants, sometimes (those boys with higher ranks) being trained to be officers. The age for this sort of thing was gradually raised with time, but even during WW2 there were still minors serving on combat vessels. 134 boy seamen died when the HMS Royal Oak was sunk in 1939.
Yeah. I’m not sure where this certainty is coming from considering how youngsters couldn’t be part of the crusades considering they’ve historically always been involved in conflict:
> In 1814, for example, Napoleon conscripted many teenagers for his armies.[28] Thousands of children participated on all sides of the First World War and the Second World War.[29][30][31][32] Children continued to be used throughout the 20th and early 21st century on every continent, with concentrations in parts of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.[33] Only since the turn of the millennium have international efforts begun to limit and reduce the military use of children.
I can see how it would be controversial because an argument could be made that children only are useful when you have some kind of artillery that doesn’t require the strength needed for a bow / crossbow. Still, I wouldn’t discount anything, especially on the purely modern subjective view of “it wouldn’t make financial sense”. Lots of human endeavors and actions don’t make financial sense. It’s not the only axis upon which humans behave.
I suspect of the controversy probably arises from the age “child” denotes. Is it a prepubescent human (lets say 10 and under) or a teenager (let’s say 13 and over).
Yeah, I think the above comment is also underselling the strength of pre-teen children, or greatly overestimating the weight of arms, armor, and the strength needed to do things with horses. Children have worked on farms around horses ever since horses were domesticated. A sword or breastplate only weighs a few pounds, a knight could easily employ a pre-teen child to polish his armor, oil his sword, wax his boots, make his breakfast, or any number of other chores a knight doesn't want to bother with personally.
Swords and breastplate weigh far more than a "few pounds." Breastplate is close to 20lbs, a two-handed sword up to 10lbs. And that's just a small amount of the armor a knight would have (ignoring the fact that most warriors of the era wore chainmail, not plate).
As far as I know, the draft in the US has always had a minimum age of 18, and one could volunteer at 17, but only with a parent's consent. Most young men grow considerably between 13 and 17.
Why is that relevant? There are also child soldiers even younger than 13, today. Just not in the US. Additionally, before the 21c US surveillance state, it was very easy to lie about your age in a way that would take a long time to verify. An enormous number of underage boys lied their way into WWII. If you were born at home, you may not have even had a birth certificate.
I wrote a research paper in college on the Children's Crusade, and the question I posed to be answered was "how many children participated in it?"
It turns out that it was a real phenomenon, and many children did leave home, but being children, practically none of them made it to the Holy Land. The journey for many was much, much shorter. And likewise, for many it was merely a spiritual crusade and they went nowhere but "TO GOD!" as they were heard to shout.
There were eyewitnesses and contemporary accounts, and I compiled an impressive list of sources to document what could be gleaned from those accounts from a modern perspective.
This story still makes the rounds, and the result is still the same. The family chose to live in unincorporated land. They turned down fire protection when the county offered it to them. They turned down fire protection when their insurer offered it to them. The fire department did what was required to save lives. Insurance can take care of the rest...oh, that's right.
Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever. I'm not sure I want the same "protect at all costs" attitude extended to buildings, but fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places.
Number one priority on any emergency scene. Life safety... my crew comes first, but I have taken some serious risk to save people. Once the humans and animals are safe, everything else is less concerning. Risk a lot to save a lot. Most "things" can be replaced. My crew takes great pride in saving homeowners animals these days as we now have some tools to help post smoke/heat exposure (Cyanokit and O2).
Adding a second reply with same sentiment. I am also a firefighter, and my main “assignment” over the years has been search/rescue.
We’ll always risk to reward. But more and more the phase after life saving is trending toward “surround and drown” - not that I want to fight like detroit in the 2010’s, but yes we do make a call sometimes to stop risking when lives are all confirmed safe.
There’s also a point where a structure is a total loss even if the “damage doesn’t look so bad from out here” at which point letting it burn as long as other buildings aren’t in danger may be the safest thing to do.
> I thought that taxes were supposed to pay for basic neighborhood services
Neighbourhood is the operative word here. In some parts of the rural United States, homes are far away and far between. Public services of the kind expected in populated areas are impractical, particularly for protection of property rather than life.
With that as a baseline, some "rural" areas maintain this peculiar, low-cost characteristic even as they become more populated. There's a degree of self-sorting behaviour as well, since some residents become attracted to the area specifically for its vanishingly small local tax burden.
I suspect you would find services limited in the middle of the Arabian desert as well.
The United States is enormous and many parts of it are incredibly sparsely populated. For example, Niobrara County in Wyoming has a population of 2,467 and an area of 6,810 km^2, or a population density of 0.36/km^2.
For comparison, the Northern Borders province, the least dense province in Saudi Arabia, has as population density of 3.4/km^2, almost ten times more people per square kilometer.
People outside of the US really have no idea how empty much of the country is. I think there's an assumption that just because much of the land is livable (i.e. not desert, bare rock, etc.), it must occupied. But that's simply not the case here.
Then perhaps the core issue is zoning land properly and making sure people don't spread out too thin.
That being said, the locality in question sounds very much like the low density suburban locale that I'm currently living in. It costs a pretty penny for the government to maintain services here, since there are only about 100 homes in an area at the edge of the desert (which at a rate of 75 per home per month as stated in the article wouldn't be able to cover a basic firefighting service). Of course, that does not bother the government in providing funds for everything from a local police station, hospital (yes, not a clinic), fire station, municipality, garbage collection, etc. The only thing missing (for the local Arabs mostly) is a government school, but then folks with families don't bother with it.
I could draw a similar example of my place in India, which has similar low density characteristics, and to make matters worse, is located in a hilly part of the district, but that doesn't stop the govt. from providing a local police force and fire fighting service complete with a helicopter.
Some amenities are basic needs that if you don't receive, then what the hell are you paying taxes for? Freedoms per second?
And no, I'm not a stranger to America's vast landscape. The fact stands that there should have been better zoning - or don't expect any facility at all, but don't make news out of it.
On a side note, the main link of this thread quotes the example of insurance companies in London in the 1830s, who would compensate each other in case their firefighters took action on fires not in their jurisdiction. If our forebears had such sensible foresight and collective responsibility, then why not America today?
Or you could just let people live where they want to live and make sure they are aware of and agree to the consequences of that choice, which it sounds like they were in this case.
> If our forebears had such sensible foresight and collective responsibility, then why not America today?
Seems like you're generalizing an awful lot from one random news article that is news largely by virtue of the fact that what it describes is unusual.
I think there is a difference between a remote place that is difficult to access and a place that is not entitled to use public firefighters' service. IMHO the former has no bearing on the latter.
I am not judging the way things work in the US, just commenting that I don't think that population density is relevant here as the issue is one of right.
Now, of course, if you live 100 miles from the nearest town it may well take hours for the police or firefighters to show up when you call them. That's another issue.
Edit: I must have written something offensive without realising it...
> I don't think that population density is relevant here as the issue is one of right.
It is absolutely relevant because services can only be logistically and economically viable at certain levels of density. Fire services aren't very useful if it takes them a two-hour drive to reach the fire. So they have a maximum radius where they are useful. They only provide value to the people within that radius. If the density is too low, then there aren't enough people in there to afford supporting fire services.
Public services are not expected to be 'economically viable' on their own. Moreover, whether there are enough people to support service is also a purely administrative and political issue.
You're not addressing my point, either, which is that there is a big difference between getting a crap service because you're hard to reach (which does happen including here in Europe) and having no right to call for help in the first place.
Again, I am not criticising, I am just thinking that there are different, separate issues here.
> Public services are not expected to be 'economically viable' on their own.
They inherently are. If these neighborhoods have fire coverage equivalent to that of a metropolis, but they would be paid for via taxation at the rate of $50K per year per household, that's not economically viable.
Public services are socialised. This means that every single person is not expected to pay as much in tax as necessary to pay for all the services they use. The aim is only that this be the case on average.
So in general people who live is more isolated houses end up being effectively subsidised by everyone else.
In your example the 'problem' stems from a tax base that is too narrow because of administrative and political choices.
In any case, that is NOT the point of my previous comments.
Much of the Midwest is sparsely populated but not unpopulated - you’re never more than a half mile from a house but never much closer than that. It can cause weird servicing issues.
State and local governments aren't exempt from tort laws, etc. If they commit to service a location 100 miles away, and can't practically do so, or someone gets hurt in trying to make heroic efforts to do so, they can and will get sued. And in such a suit, making that sort of unrealistic commitment can and will be held against them.
I don't think that this is how it works (paying taxes doesn't entitle to a level of service) but I admit I don't know US law.
As a side note, in this very case the issue wasn't remoteness since they could have had access to firefighters for a small annual fee. Rather it was a legal and administrative issue. But I would indeed be curious if voluntarily paying a fee rather then being taxed can have an impact on any enforceable expectation of service.
By living on unincorporated land, they wouldn't have been subject to the tax that pays for the fire department (which would be county level or city level I'm guessing?)
Some states like Virginia have city and county both at the top local level. Richmond City is completely separate from the extremely rural Richmond county located more than an hour away.
Virginia is also technically a Commonwealth and not a state as well.
> Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever.
ERs in the US are required to provide stabilizing care to patients who come in, even if the patient can't pay, by law. It's a law because otherwise some of them wouldn't.
Eh, kinda, but it's not like you can walk into an ER with just any condition and get treated for free. You've got to be having pretty serious problems before they're required to do anything about it, and even then they're not required to fully treat you, just get you stable.
The municipal fire department's insurer told them that they would not cover injuries sustained while fighting fires on uninsured homes, which was the final straw for the fire department.
The FD had tried for years to find a workable solution and failed because the people in the unincorporated part of the county just didn't want to pay for fire services. IIRC, the county had tried three times in the previous decade to pass taxes to either fund the municipal FD or set up their own; three times the residents of the unincorporated part voted against it. The FD had tried retroactively charging owners, and spent more on collections than they'd earn.
They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. And they eventually put it out to prevent it spreading. Just not with the same fervor of preventing property damage.
Funny, we get called for much less than a hurt knee and failing vision via 911 every day. I don't have a choice other to send them to the ER if that is what they want. I recently went to a call where the young man thought he took too much "extenze"... Long story short, we checked vitals and asked if he wanted to be seen at ER for further evaluation. "Nah man, I got work to do now... just thought I was gonna die for a second." Anxiety and Panic... number one call type.
My wife called for me because I accidentally drank my mouthwash. I couldn't speak and technically couldn't breath for a minute. And I would have been fine, but the bottle said to call poison control (or something - this was 10 years back) if ingested. So my wife called while I was wheezing. By the time the ambulance arrived I was totally fine... sorry about that too
> They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision.
I thought in the US, hospitals were only required to stabilize, not treat, non-paying patients. For example, if someone has cancer, they are not required to perform surgery or chemotherapy, just stabilize their symptoms at the moment.
> And they eventually put it out to prevent it spreading.
Reading the article, that's not true.
They watered down the fence line to protect someone else's land.
> Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee.
> "They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn," Cranick said.
So to your examples...
> They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision.
It would be closer to the story if it was "they won't save you, but they'll spray down everyone else with a disinfectant to protect them from your disease."
They will evaluate you and give you a ride home if you are indigent. There are places where it's not uncommon to call 911 for a runny nose or whatever, request ER care, and get the medicab home.
Not true. An emergency department in the US is obligated to provide life-saving care, as are EMS services and hospital doctors if the ER doc thinks you have an immediately life threatening condition . But a random oncologist has no obligation to treat you if you have a life-threatening cancer, unless you go to an ER and they determine that your condition is immediately life-threatening (say, a perforated bowel). Then the surgeon will treat you enough that you are not inmediately dying, but they are not obligated to say, remove an underlying cancer if it’s not causing immediately life threatening problems
But people complain about this too. No one seriously talks about not treating people in the ER with gun wounds, but Obamacare explicitly introduced the mandate that you get insurance or pay a penalty to address this very issue. Everyone is entitled to a basic level of care, but the mandate says that you should have to pay for it.
This mandate makes sense from a moral point of view, especially for true emergency situations. However, the act didn't take care of the cost of care, which was placed on hospitals and ultimately passed on to other patients and the government. Obamacare attempted to address this issue.
EMTALA also distorted US healthcare be redirecting poorer people to expensive emergency care rather than preventive or primary care, which might well serve many of their needs better. That's also something that Obamacare was designed to fix.
The Obamacare penalty for not buying insurance was eliminated by Trump, because reintroducing the free rider problem is a cornerstone of GOP health policy.
Reinstating the penalty is going to cost political goodwill, which is why the Dems aren't doing it.
Regardless of whether the penalty is or is not in place, I wouldn't recommend being poor and sick, regardless of whether you are insured, or are freeloading.
It wasn’t the Trump administration but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals which struck down the mandate as unconstitutional and being liberal and a supporter of health care reform I think they had a point. I can’t see in the constitution where the federal government has the power to force me to buy health insurance. I like my constitutional rights being protected even when the thing being compelled (me having insurance) is a good idea. It means that things which are not quite so good of ideas have less chance of being forced on me later.
The plaintiffs in the case were several gop attorney generals. Related cases were also carried out by the Trump admin. And several courts had previously upheld that the ACA was constitutional because it does not force you to buy health insurance. It actually just imposed a fine if you didn't and that fine was considered a tax, which Congress has constitutional authority to levy. The GOP forum shopped to get in front of a rubber stamp republican judge.
Additionally, the whole point of these cases was not simply to get rid of the penalty. The idea was to get rid of the penalty so they could go back to the supreme court and again claim that the mandate is unconstitutional because now there is no "tax" associated with it.
I don't know where things are at now, but it seems unlikely to go anywhere now because it would be difficult to argue that buying insurance is required at all at this point. So we are left with the backup gop strategy of hoping that disarming the mandate will simply bankrupt the program. At least until republican voters wake up and realize that the program is miles better than what we had before.
I likewise do not approve of the Feds expanding their powers arbitrarily by declaring the punishment for whatever they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to enforce “a tax”. Calling the insurance mandate constitutional because the punishment was a “tax” was abusing the intent of the law.
It's pointless to try to draw a distinction here, because you can re-frame the exact same behavior several different ways, some of which are already common, so it doesn't represent any expansion of power. Like, raise taxes by that much and give people with insurance a credit for it, but not those without insurance. Done. No "worse" than e.g. child tax credits, as far as constitutionality. Insisting that the law do some particular word-dance to get to the exact same place isn't productive and doesn't defend liberty.
If you worried about fines being used to deter activities society doesn’t want, and that fine money being collected as tax revenue, you are at least 200 years too late.
Trump's government repealed the individual mandate penalty, and then the court ruled ruled that in it's new form, it no longer qualified as a tax and was unconstitutional. (Not that this meant anything, since the legality of a fee of $0 doesn't matter.)
The court case as a whole argued that because the GOP changed the ACA in a manner that made part of it (the $0 fee) illegal, the entirety of the ACA should be made illegal.
The fifth circuit agreed with some of the arguments in the case (the fee one), but did not practically change anything about the ACA.
And then SCOTUS, surprising ~everyone, ruled that actually the whole of the ACA is constitutional.
Look at this timeline, and you tell me - who spent years trying to re-introduce the free rider problem, and to break the ACA? Congress, the president, and the plaintiff states... or the fifth circuit, which when presented with a singular, narrow question, ruled that a $0 fee (whatever that is) isn't a tax?
Now, as of 2022, we are in a world where the ACA has been thoroughly litigated, and is still here, with the free rider problem hanging like a millstone over its neck.
calling insurance a tax is about as strong an indication of regulatory capture as I can think of.
It should have never been a tax specifically because it's an unconstitutional act. Calling it a tax is the letter vs the spirit of the constitution.
If you and others like yourself want to ensure everyone has health insurance then __make it mandatory for the state to pay for it__. Anything else and you're just taxing the poor for being poor.
That is an interesting opinion, but at this point, both a conservative, and then a super-conservative, packed-with-federalist-society SCOTUS has disagreed with you twice on this issue (5-4) and then (7-2). It's about as written-in-stone as you can get in the United States.
The courts think this is above-board, the executive thinks this is above-board, most of the public thinks its above-board, it's safe to say its above-board.
As I recall, the whole "call the penalty a tax" thing was Roberts' tortured justification for allowing it in the 5-4 vote. Nobody ever really believed it was a tax.
> Slavery was also considered above-board at one point, so...
It was also perfectly constitutional[0], hence the need for that 13th amendment. And that civil war thing. As it turns out, the constitution kind of sucks[0], it has a lot of problems with it. Fewer than it did in the past, but we aren't quite at the end of history just yet.
You're going to need a better complaint than 'it's unconstitutional', as this is pretty verifiably constitutional. The people who have been empowered[1] by the founding fathers to determine what is, and what is not constitutional have determined that this is constitutional. It's not a matter of opinion at this point.
> carrying private service X is required for you to exist in the united states.
And that's nothing new. Government can compel all sorts of things from you. Showing up to contribute your labour to a jury duty. Involuntary servitude in the military. Taxing the land you live on. Following emergency orders. Not heading a communist political movement. Every society - even this society - provides you with privileges, and requires obligations from you.
This obligation has been ruled to be well within the legal framework of this society, and if you think it should be outside that legal framework, you should look into passing a constitutional amendment on the subject.
Or, you could believe that this obligation is a constitutional, but bad idea, and have the legislature repeal it. Either way, it's currently constitutional. [0]
[0] You're confusing 'constitutional' with 'just'. They are not the same thing.
[1] Actually, SCOTUS' powers in this sphere are what's unconstitutional[2], but we all close our eyes, and collectively pretend that they are.
[2] You're not going to find anything in either the constitution, or passed legislature granting SCOTUS the incredibly broad powers it currently enjoys. These powers were invented out of thin air, and are backed by neither fiat, nor democratic will. All that the constitution says on the subject is 'We should, like, probably have courts. That should do stuff, maybe.'
the question is whether or not the government can force you to pay for a __PRIVATE__ service just for __EXISTING__ within the borders of the US.
There is __NO PRECEDENT__ for this. The closest you can get are things like car insurance where you're required to carry insurance in order to drive on US roads. You can choose not to drive, you cannot choose to "not exist".
That puts this into an entirely different category. The fact that it originally got rationalized as a tax opens a whole different can of worms. Good luck refusing to pay taxes.
I'm entirely willing to accept that it's a bad law (It is, for multiple reasons - unfortunately, the situation without it is even worse), I'm simply drawing the line at claims that it's an illegal law (It's not, it's been pretty thoroughly litigated).
Elimination of pre-existing condition exclusions, and restrictions on which factors can be used to set pricing for policies—both wildly popular—create a free rider problem.
Well, right, because most other advanced-economy states require you to carry insurance (more-or-less the solution we were going for, before the penalty for failing to have insurance was eliminated) or cover everyone under a government-provided healthcare scheme of one sort or another.
If your point is just that the US healthcare system is far more-broken than most, and in some unique ways, all for no good reason—sure, yeah, of course that's true.
"Gun wound" as in a wound caused by (actively) using a gun, or a bullet wound, typically caused by someone else using a gun? I could understand the former (like excluding accidents while skiing, skydiving, whatever), but excluding the latter seem pretty cynical.
The vast majority of gun wounds in the US are purposeful crimes or suicides
For deaths, there's maybe 300 accidental deaths, 10,000 - 15,000 homicides, and like 60,000 suicides. Non-death injuries scale similarly, with the caveat that like 6,000 ish people per year try to kill themselves with a gun and fail, but still injure themselves.
Saving burning buildings with no people in them is still a risk to the firefighters’ lives. Why go through that when the owners explicitly declined the protection repeatedly?
In fact Hospitals were not required to treat you until 1986, which was part of the COBRA act.
Prior to that there was a large practice of "Patient Dumping" where a hospital would kick you out if they found out they you couldn't pay for your treatment. Hospitals in the US would literally let you die out side the ER doors.
Then you protect the insured buildings, not really sure why it's an issue?
The same logic could apply to police... what if all the crime is coming from an unincorporated part of town? Do you just go and start policing it (kind of like an invading army occupying)? Or do you erect borders / station patrol cars near key locations?
You call the county sheriff. Sheriffs and courts were the original reason why counties exist, and why there aren't any parts of the country that exist outside of a county, while there are quite a lot of people living outside of any incorporated city.
They will save you from an acute emergency, stabilize you, then dump you into a care home with inadequate care or to the street as appropriate, where you play the long game of succumbing to whatever ails you.
No. Hospitals will do what they have to *against immediate threats*. They will not do what's needed in the bigger picture if they are not paid. You don't get the chemotherapy etc if you can't pay.
Just FYI for all those in the thread who don't know, unincorporated doesn't mean "no taxes, no fees". Generally the county provides services (Sheriffs and Constables, fire dept.), and ambulances tend to all be private anyways. If you're in the middle of nowhere then you may have to join a co-op for helicopter medical, and the nearest fire station may be too far to save your house in a fire.
If you're in the middle of nowhere you're probably also on unincorporated land, but the challenges of being in the middle of nowhere have nothing to do with the land being unincorporated.
The family accepted fire protection from their insurer and claim they forgot to pay the $75 fee, not declined to do so. It's possible they opted out, it's also possible it was an oversight. Certainly, the more human thing would be to make opting in/out more explicit and handle a late payment by sending it to collections (or reminder notifications) instead of just turning service off.
Or do you have any evidence they actively opted out of the $75 payment?
A reporter on the scene spoke to the homeowner, who said he didn't pay the fee because he thought he could just pay after, like happened previously. He literally thought he could get away with not paying unless a fire happened. It's a textbook case of moral hazard.
I discussed the case a lot at the time it happened, and it never came out that he "forgot" to pay the fee. It was very clear at the time that he thought he didn't need to and they'd put out the fire anyway.
People do the same with AAA - don’t pay to renew until you need a tow and pay the renewal over the phone. I think they’re a bit smarter now and make you pay for the years you skipped.
That's hard as I wouldn't back pay but my insurance company goes back and forth on doing roadside depending on if you have comprehensive and has changed the rule and rates to be more or less competitive with AAA. When it's cheaper I use my I aurance, when not AAA. If they made me back pay I wouldn't use them. But I generally don't just do the sign up and tow immediately.
I had not heard that. Reports I saw at the time said he "forgot".
At any rate, in response to the story, the county changed it so paying when your house was already ablaze was a punitive but not impossible option. I believe it was $3,500 when they instituted it.
Which, frankly, seems like the proper way to handle the moral hazard.
That's still the same problem though. If nobody pays the town is still going to be out money even if it's possible to collect $3500. And the reason they don't put out the blaze and then just charge if someone doesn't have insurance is because they won't be able to collect.
The problem is that the municipality is a subordinate gov't within the county. They have no leverage over people outside the municipality, and basically had to have a court fight for every uncollected fee/fine, which rapidly ate all the money that could be collected... if the person living almost tax free on unincorporated land in a mobile home had the money to be collected.
Not quite the same thing, but there are certainly places where people will choose to live, without conventional fire department coverage. I live on an island on Canada's coast, where there is a fire department, funded as a local improvement area. It covers ~ 90% of the population, on a much smaller proportion of the island's area.
People do live in some of these less-accessible part of the island, but it's outside of the department's service area. Fires in other areas are officially the responsibility of the regional fire service, like for forest fires. Our department might go on certain calls, especially life safety, but will typically keep some people and vehicles back in our own service area in case calls come in there as well.
I think the term for people outside of the district is "self-insured", because nobody else will be able to assist quickly.
Article doesn't seem to agree with you here, instead citing different reason:
> South Fulton's mayor said that the fire department can't let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on fire.
How do you calculate the "full cost" of having staff on call 24/7, well maintained equipment that's regularly inspected, building inspectors to verify that fire code is being met to keep usage down to sustainable levels, and so on? The full cost isn't $10k in salary and gasoline and foam, it's millions.
My city spends ~$20M/y on the fire department [1] and has ~300 structure fires and ~14k callouts annually [2]. The cost for a marginal fire is definitely not millions; even if you only divide $20M by 300 you get $70k and that ignores the tens of thousands of other calls they take.
Total cost of running the department for a year, divided by the number of callouts. Possibly weight the callout types depending on approximate resources consumed.
Though I am fully in support of just letting the house burn.
These costs still exist in a hypothetical year with zero fires, though. Additionally, people whose house were just on fire with zero insurance are probably not in a good financial position (anymore), and they are unlikely to be able to pay…
If you don't have the money, then a lien is placed on the property and it will be sold to pay the debt. Or you can take out a mortgage to buy it. In any case you'll be richer than if the house is burned down.
Ability to pay still not guaranteed, depending on the financial situation. Family can easily have more that's than assets to their name, preventing collection.
amortize that cost over the population that is covered; perhaps discount the services utilized by residents who pre-pay and charge a premium for those who pay on the spot.
Another problem is the difference between agreeing to pay and ability to pay. Someone might be wiling to pay anything in the moment, but you might be hopelessly unable to actually collect.
The fire brigade would borrow the technique of Marcus Licinius Crassus and buy your property as it burned, improve its value by extinguishing the fire, then rent it back to you.
I grew up in a poor, rural area of the US and can attest that it's true... if you didn't pay the fee (and affix the requisite metal sign below your mailbox) you were on your own in the event of a fire.
At that time and place, fire protection wasn't considered a public service unless you lived in town. I never heard anyone question the arrangement and there was little appetite in that era for the tax increase that would've been required to provide universal protection.
That depends on which rural area. I've lived in several rural areas, and we always had automatic fire service provided by the township, it was just another required tax line item. Normally they contracted with the nearest town (I know in one case the township legally owned half the town fire department and paid half the costs, the others I don't know what the details were, just that there was service from the nearest town). I know of townships that don't contract with a nearby town - but then they go in with other rural townships to form a fire department (generally volunteer - farmers sometimes got a call to leave the tractor and fight a fire)
Townships only exist in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; most of the rest have counties. As you say, it varies from place to place; any of them could start a fire service if the residents vote for it and fund it via local taxes.
Ohio has townships within its counties; they serve as a catch-all for areas that aren't otherwise incorporated as cities/villages, and that can make a big difference for local property tax and services.
Townships exist in most states - only the original 13 colonies don't have them. they are a federal thing, and how land was surveyed (IIRC is dates back to the Louisiana Purchase, but I can't find verification in a quick search. How each state use them differs, but the concept of a 6 mile by 6 mile section of land comes from the federal government. Originally one section (1 square mile) of land was set aside for the local school to own - some would be sold to build the school and rent from the rest would provide for the school teacher's salary.
Most states also have a county, but this is different from a township. New Jersey and Pennsylvania (as part of the original 13 colonies) don't take part in the federal township system and have their own system with the same name that is otherwise not related.
> And here we are in modern times where we do, indeed, let buildings burn.
The linked article aside, letting buildings burn down is in fact standard procedure for fire fighters. A sufficiently dense fire is extremely hard to stop as long as it can fuel itself and a controlled burn down is often the only reasonable way to end a fire. It's not like anything would be recoverable in any case.
Defensive operations on an active fire ground are standard operating procedures; no argument.
But most departments do not operate the way this department in Tennessee does where they did not run the call when it was received because the caller was not on their participant list.
They would have likely encountered a brush fire or, at most, a room and contents fire from the structures closest exposure based on the story and they would not have let it just freely burn.
I am absolutely not defending whatever happened in that article. Truly a bizarre situation.
Where I live firefighters certain actions will require a fee (obviously not paid to the firefighters), like pumping out a cellar or felling a tree on private land which is not threatening any property, but actually not fighting a fire when it would be easily possible would be unthinkable.
Yes. And these duties can easily conflict (in which case preservation of life always has priority). Another reason to let a house burn is because there are still firefighters in there, searching for people.
The clothing of firefighters (at least the Nomex based used here) is extremely good at insulating from heat, but looses almost all protection the moment it gets wet, as the water starts boiling. Obviously that is extremely dangerous for the wearer.
This means that often saving lives and saving property can not be done simultaneously. Some time ago here there was a report about house ownwers getting upset at firefighters for just standing around "doing nothing", while their property burned, which happened exactly for the reason outlined above.
A friend of mine lived in a rural town with a weird mistake in its code, that let him build at the top of an extremely steep grade. The town said, legally we can't stop you (though they immediately fixed the code) but there's no way a fire truck can get up your driveway. Sure enough, his large detached shed with vintage cars in it went up in smoke, and the firefighters tried but couldn't get their truck up there.
Interestingly, the low density of a rural area probably changes the calculus on "let it burn or eat the loss as a prevention measure" as opposed to places where uninsured buildings might be physically touching insured ones.
If this is the same story I read a long time ago, one of the reasons the firefighters didn't intervene is because their health insurance wouldn't cover any injuries, due to the house not being part of their unit's responsibilities.
Universal health care might have changed the firefighters' minds. On the other hand, perhaps other liabilities would not have been covered too, so maybe not.
I think it was a fundamental lapse of judgement and incompetence on the firefighters side. They should have had a plan for uninsured fires nearby, and been able to execute it. What is the marginal cost of putting out a fire for the uninsured, I'm sure its quite low - equipment is paid for, staff is payed for, etc. So they should be able to make a substantial profit by charging $20k for putting it out, or whatever amount they deem necessary.
Just because this was an emergency doesn't mean it wasn't unexpected. We would want firefighters to go the next town over if there was a fire there, so it seems like their insurance policy was improperly under specified.
>>They should have had a plan for uninsured fires nearby, and been able to execute it.
They did have a plan, and they did execute on it - exactly as they advertised.
...and if they decided to risk it, and put out the fire anyway - and tied up all their pumps hoses ladders and trucks, and then another call comes in a few miles away - from someone that did pay for coverage - how much liability would they have for tying up all of their equipment at a fire they are not supposed to be fighting, and thus unable to respond to the fires they are supposed to be responding to?
People in this country should be free to make stupid decisions - and free to suffer the consequences of those stupid decisions.
> South Fulton's mayor said that the fire department can't let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on fire.
There must be a price that the fire department could theoretically charge if they were gonna always charge on the spot, and still make a profit, as long as there is some minimum number of fires.
Also it says that this TN guy had insurance. I wonder if it would have been worth his insurance company's while to make sure that $75 was always paid, either by paying it themselves, or making him pay it, or paying it and sending him the bill, and somehow making it a condition.. to protect themselves from having to pay out... as the London article is about insurance companies starting fire brigades themselves for that very reason
The FD had tried retroactively charging for fire services, but then spent more on collections than they'd collect. People living in the unincorporated part of the county were usually trying to pay as little as possible for anything. Three times they voted down taxes to fund fire services generally.
Not to mention the question of duress when the FD shows up and says "sign this and we'll put out the fire."
Don't know how it works there, but the bank through which we have our home loan requires insurance, payment of property taxes, etc. and to ensure all that actually happens it's done through an escrow account. We pay one bill to the bank every month, they handle the rest. Seems like a solid way to make sure these kinda things don't happen, and then we can't forget something like the property tax, which happens every six months.
Back on the farm, which is 30 minutes from the nearest fire brigade, one does have to pay to opt-in for fire service. They still answer the phone if you're not on the list. You're also strongly encouraged to have a pond or cistern near anything you want saved. I don't know if the farm's mortgage required payment of that fee, but I do know we were given insurance discounts for having ponds near the houses and barn.
I do know of one case of a particularly belligerent property owner who refused to pay, had fires, still wouldn't pay, etc. who did eventually wind up with firefighters watching his property burn. Hard to really feel bad about something like that.
How would you deal with the credit risk? or are you assuming that the homeowner has arbitrary amounts of cash, at hand, but somehow not in the burning house?
A libertarian scheme would look like what neighboring counties in Tennessee do, which is to charge you an hourly rate per truck if you didn't pay the subscription fee up front. This is a case where clearly no one thought about how to handle the free rider problem beforehand. I believe they've changed the policy since.
No, the competing insurance companies as described in the video is a libertarian scheme. Counties in Tennessee are a state run operation and their refusal to fight fires is a function of jurisdictional borders, which does not exactly match libertarian values.
I’m commenting on the parent which was responding to the anecdote about Tennessee, and not the article. The fire fighters in question in rural Tennessee are volunteers and NOT run by the state. That’s why they came up with the subscription services. Some of the counties and towns do contract with fire departments, but not all of them and not the one in question.
I’m not actually sure what you’re trying to say here.
I didn't realize this was even an assertion that people made at all.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. People at the time must have known that fires in cities were extremely dangerous because they could spread over a great area. It's logical that insurers would want to work together to prevent all fires, purely out of self-interest to protect their insured properties, and then sue the pants off negligent and/or uninsured property owners after each near-miss.
The paper in TFA says as much, but it's weird to me that people would uncritically accept the proposed narrative in the first place.
* The first Fire Brigade, in Rome, was established by someone who would insist on buying your building before extinguishing the fire [1]
* In the present day, you can live in an unincorporated area, decline fire protection offers from the county and from your insurer, and the fire brigade won't come out if you have a fire [2]
* The article provides 11 different sources for the apparently incorrect claim London's insurance fire brigades circa-1700 let uninsured buildings burn.
Personally I find it quite easy to understand why people might believe the incorrect claim.
> The paper in TFA says as much, but it's weird to me that people would uncritically accept the proposed narrative in the first place.
That's the point though. In spite of the logical and practical evaluation, there was evidence from multiple, trusted sources that said otherwise. And history is full of people doing dumb things and making bad decisions, so why not this one too?
Also, it's self-affirming - "Look at us! We've got problems, but at least we know well enough to fight fires when there is one, despite money problems"
There are rational reasons to reduce risk, even if it isn't some game theoretic optimum. One can easily imagine that certain owners either were concerned about an increased risk of fire or high damages in such an event and we're willing to bear the costs.
The incentives are very clear, if nobody does it, no fire brigades will exist. (I can also imagine other reasons, e g. membership might have been required by some law or by association.) And in the end every fire which is extinguished is a fire which didn't spread.
Just some little aside, today there are people who do firefighting for free. What are the incentives for that?
> Furthermore, only buildings were insured – neither their contents, nor the lives of their occupants, were covered.
Yeah it sounds to me from the article like the insurance was for the rebuild, and the firefighting was something the insurance company did to reduce their payouts.
So I imagine if you didn't have insurance, you still were at more risk than if you did, similar to now, because the fire dept isn't going to save everything every time.
It is covered in the article; the free-rider problem was a problem, in London eventually the fire-brigades appear to have basically convinced the city to buy them because they couldn’t solve it.
It could be... But were the laws that way in 17th century England?
I suspect not, because property ownership in England used to be secret - ie. Even the government may not have known who owned land. And if you don't know who owns it, who must pay the bill?
We are the defacto fire and medical insurance providers in metropolitan areas that employ/staff fire and EMS departments. Funded by property or sales tax, we have become the primary care providers for thousands of people in our cities.
We also get called for water leaks, hazardous spills, vehicle accidents, construction mishaps, swift water rescues, hiker rescues, venomous snake removal, bee attacks and dangerous hive removal, roof collapses, natural gas leaks, stubbed toes, fentanyl abuse, mental health emergencies, gun fights, knife fights, cooking fires, refrigerant leaks, trench collapse, people and things stuck in very high places, flash floods, electrical problems and much much more...
“The Guild of Firefighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the previous year after many complaints. The point was that, if you bought a contract from the Guild, your house would be protected against fire.
Unfortunately, the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the fore and fire fighters would tend to go to prospective clients’ houses in groups, making loud comments like ‘Very inflammable looking place, this’ and ‘Probably go up like a firework with just one carelessly-dropped match, know what I mean?’”
This is likely more directly inspired by Marcus Licinius Crassus:
> The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.
Maritime Law had a provision for salvors that saved ships in distress from sinking. If a salvor saved a ship from sinking, they were entitled to a percentage of the worth of a ship. Maybe terrestrial law needs something similar in the case of uninsured building on fire.
With private fire brigades, there was sometimes a monetary reward for being first to the scene. Sounds like a good incentive, right? But it resulted in competition between companies, to the point that they would sabotage each other. The article itself has some examples, and there are similar ones from United States' history.
I imagine some similar issues have happened at sea, but it seems harder to take advantage of and make profit on, since it probably wasn't too common for ships with expensive cargo to sink. And even if they did, it would be hard to guarantee getting there in time. Whereas in a city, fires are a pretty regular occurrence.
Interestingly, something similar happens with maritime law as to what was alluded to in the article and in this post. Similar to the competition and chaos caused by "First to respond and put it out", certain salvage companies will ignore Coast Guard warnings that a boat is already accounted for, that the insurance company has already hired a salvage company to reclaim the boat, and instead other salvage companies will try to hurry out to the boat and claim it. Similar to the Terry Pratchett quote, salvage companies will fortuitously find that your boat detached from a mooring ball and drifted to sea if it's left unmanned for long periods of time.
So while a pretty good system, it's not without its flaws and perverse incentives.
At least in the US - most areas assess the value of the structure and the value of the land separately.
I'd be in favor of providing a lien on the existing title in the amount of the structure's value (or some relatively high percentage of it, maybe depending on how much is salvaged by the firefighters) if the fire department puts out an uninsured building.
There's no reason to let it burn - it's a waste of resources, big source of pollutants, and a risk to neighboring areas. But I also think you can't reward property owners for taking a gamble that their property won't catch on fire.
Or, god forbid, protect the general welfare of the population of Yahoo County by having a fire service?
The government has the ability to tax for such services. As a partner who own a piece of a rental property in a ex-urban town, the volunteer fire company levies a tax that amounts to $300/year (based on valuation) which covers 2-3 towns with fire, ems and paramedic services.
The problem comes when the only government is the county - it may simply be impractical to have a firefighting crew that can reach anything in a reasonable amount of time. (There are sparse counties in the US that can’t be crossed by a firefighting helicopter in less than 60 minutes).
Voters in the county in question did eventually approve "universal" fire response, either small prepaid fee or post-paid full cost after response, but it sounds as though they won't consider converting the fees into standard taxes until 70% of residents have opted in to protection. Quite a few people who live and vote there seemingly have no interest in fire service.
The “farmers” didn’t want to deal with a 0.13% property tax increase.
A place where the people who control the place are so reactionary and regressive that a piddly increase in a tax levy requires a 70% supermajority is a place to move away from. Gross.
Sure - but that doesn't cover the cases where we clearly have folks who do not pay, or regions that vote in ways to clearly place no priority on those shared services.
And in your case - the results are actually very similar (What do you think happens when you fail to pay your city/county taxes? A lien on your title happens...)
So again - I'm all for creating shared services and paying for them, but some folks aren't. In those cases I'd still rather not see people's homes burn (for all sorts of reasons) and this is a meaningful incentive to put the home out.
Except in this case - it very literally isn't the firefighters damn job. They have not been hired to put out this fire. Full fucking stop. And just so we're fully clear here - this is a job that is extremely risky to personal health and safety.
Honestly - I think your attitude here is actually far more childish than mine. You're preaching about what's right and moral - I'm discussing practical details and incentives that might make people actually go do a thing.
My attitude is hardly making an assumption that life is fair - it's about making sure that service (fire fighting) has a space in which to exist at all.
Because what we're really talking about here is a social contract...
When it becomes clear that violating the social contract has no downside - many more folks start to do it, and we rapidly end up in a spot where the company that wrote the contract (Us - we the freaking people wrote the contract) are bankrupt. And now not only do the people not paying not have a fire service... NO ONE has a fire service. Because few people were willing to chip in the money when they got the benefit for free.
So back to your silly, silly question:
"Is it fair that you paid for firefighting and your neighbor didn’t but still had their house saved during a fire?"
That's absolutely relevant outside of a single isolated case. It might not matter for one instance - it matters a whole freaking lot in aggregate.
We probably have better financial structures in 2022 than that, like insurance (or taxes that fund professional firefighting, like NYC).
Besides: it isn't clear we should incentivize untrained professionals to run into burning buildings. Ships are somewhat unique in that the people who are saving you are also sailors, and are presumably at least minimally qualified to help another ship in distress.
Clearly, the fundamental argument here is about private provision of services vs. public provision of services. Is the optimal fire protection service one based on private subscriber payment to firefighters or a publicly (taxpayer or other government revenue-funded) operated fire department?
The best IMO way to view this is to first clarify whether or not that service falls into the 'natural monopoly' category, at least when it comes to basic provision of services. That category is defined by having a lack of meaningful or feasible competition, i.e. would multiple competing services result in a better outcome than a single state-run service would?
My view is that provision of fire and police services, health care and education services, water, electricity and fiber optic connectivity service, as well as the maintenance of roads, etc. generally fall into the natural monopoly sector, with caveats:
1) People should be able to augment basic services however they wish, to they extent they can afford. One can purchase a fire engine and a water tank and keep it on one's property, for example. Private security guards can be hired to augment police protection. One can hire a home nurse and expensive medical equipment, etc. Private tutors can be hired to augment a child's education.
2) State-run services should have competitive processes built in - i.e. we may have a public fire department, but the manufacture and sale of fire-fighting equipment is a competitive business and should not be monopolized, etc. Corruption in the form of fire officials giving preferential contracts to sub-par manufacturers in exchange for bribes should be a serious criminal activity, etc.
> People should be able to augment basic services however they wish, to they extent they can afford.
Here's the problem with such schemes. Often both the providers and the customers of "augmenting services" will have an incentive to hollow out the state-provided service until it's substandard.
For instance, let's say the government provides "basic" health insurance but allows private plans. Then the providers of private plans will lobby the government to keep the "basic" service as low-quality as possible, so that people are incentivized to buy the private plans. Furthermore, those who purchase private plans will not personally benefit much from the state-provided scheme, so they will have little interest in its success and little desire to subsidize it.
In the worst case, the result is that the state-run service becomes permanently low-quality. Then people attribute this to public-sector inefficiency and say that "obviously" the free market would do a better job. Then the state-provided service gets abolished when it never had a chance to succeed.
I think there is a distinction between a natural monopoly that people are compelled to pay for, and one which is only regulated.
For regulated monopolies, there's further the distinction well if they are paid by the users of the service, or by taxes levied on the general population.
When it comes to water power and electricity, I think individuals should be able to opt out if they do not want the service by the Monopoly.
Why is trash pickup not bundled with property taxes? It's seems ridiculous to charge for it separately when every occupied home will generate a similar amount of trash.
Why should it be part of taxes at all? I've lived in places with city trash pickup, and places where you choose your own private company to get your trash (in the later some cheap people just drove their trash to the dump every couple months). The costs were about the same in the best case so long as the private people shopped around, and in the worst cases the city didn't shop around and so costs were a lot more.
You don't want your neighbor to not have trash pickup if they live within smelling distance. You want their trashed to be picked up. If you live in an area where that can easily become a problem, it becomes important to make it regular and "included".
If you have more space/land in between, it doesn't matter nearly as much.
Smaller households can generate less trash. In our area you can pick between 3 sizes of trash/recycling/green bins. The trash bin size determines the service cost but there is no additional cost for the recycling and green bins.
Probably because you can get them to stop picking up and charging if you show some process of your own. Sewage is sometimes bundled with property tax, sometimes with the water bill - another example.
- In some states there's a cap on property tax increases. So the moving to a fee-model takes it off the tax levy by making it a user fee.
- Bundling trash services with the tax levy is inequitable in that commercial properties are subsidizing services they do not use. A 20 unit apartment building usually has to use a private hauler, for example.
- Some places try to setup consumption based models, where you pay per occupancy unit or even by the bag.
I feel like people might read this (or just the headline) and take away a message like "aha, so for-profit fire companies actually worked just fine!"
As far as I know, there are still plenty of examples of that model failing hideously in various ways (eg: [1][2], and many examples of unproductive competition from TFA itself). This article is specifically about firefighting in London, in a certain time period — notably starting after the Great Fire, when presumably those dangers were fresh in people's minds.
And also, to its credit, I think the article leaves the question pretty muddy and un-answered.
It also ends with the fire brigades basically asking the city to take over because they couldn’t solve the free-rider problem, so anyone who thinks of it as an example of the free market system working clearly didn’t read far enough.
Can we just appreciate that Tom took his videos so seriously that he hired a researcher to investigate when one of his sources turned out not to be true.
Other situations exist in which firefighters don't kill themselves (quite literally) over it. Take fast food joints. First, they're notorious for not cleaning their grease traps, but second, many are self-insured. More interestingly, the fast-food companies tend to scrap a building that has had a fire, have it scraped down to the concrete pad, and build again. Source: was just talking with a fire chief about this.
I once heard some Lenny Bruce standup that gave me the impression that firemen were generally considered opportunistic thieves at the time of the material's delivery, independent of its punchline.
This seems like an interesting short survey of London firefighting history, but I'm missing the debunking people are remarking about. The only thing that slightly resembles debunking is that in the conclusion the idea that fire brigades ever let houses burn is referred to in passing as a "legend."
In regard to the legend - I don't think that anyone ever said that fire brigades would refuse to put out uninsured buildings where the fire might spread to other buildings, that fire brigades couldn't be induced by cash to put out the fires of the uninsured, or that cities never offered baseline inducements for fire brigades to put out fires whether the buildings were insured or not. That would be adding content to the "legend" in order to debunk it. Looking at the record and finding out that all of these things happened is expected and unremarkable.
The fires that we would expect not to be put out if the "legend" were accurate would be fires that happened to uninsured buildings that didn't endanger nearby structures, buildings owned by people who didn't have enough cash or credit to convince an uncontracted fire brigade to act, that were close enough to the city to be accessible to a fire brigade yet far enough away that the city didn't feel responsible for them. Additionally, the chance that a building owner might simply pay (under flaming duress) a brigade that showed up would mean that they probably generally would show up, and if they weren't ever willing to watch a building burn, they'd be undercutting their own last minute deals.
These are the exactly the fires that we would expect not to be in the record. Fires in detached structures, owned by people with no money.
It seems that the city started rewarding brigades for putting out fires in uninsured households based on the order in which they arrived. Additionally, they were consolidating/federating in order to take on larger contracts - which incidentally meant [original scholarship] that the consolidated/federated brigades would always get the first arrival bonus through this collusion. As the number of independent brigades dwindled and the socialist city reward money became large enough that the actual insurance element receded to only being profitable for large contracts rather than individual homes, the consolidated block of fire brigades organized their own nationalization.
Even with this information included. I think the moral of the story is America has some very serious third-world problems. The reason things like this go on in America and not in any other developed country is that Americans just accept it. "They didn't pay, so they die." Here is how much they accept it, firefighters literally stood and watched a building burn down instead of playing with their toys. Not only that, the fire department refused to accept money to put it out.
This whole "unincorporated land" execuse is a sad state of affairs. The whole "You're not with us, so it's not our problem" mindset is really why America is so low down on every single ranking in the world, except for military might. It seems like a constant battle to make sure you're doing ok at the expense of others. School kids getting shot? It's ok, I can still have my gun. Unarmed people getting shot by police? It's ok, they haven't shot me. Corrupt police officer hired a town over? It's ok, he's their problem now. People dying because they can't afford to visit a doctor? That's ok, I can.
Instead of grouping together the US has decided to constantly separate it self among itself. Other countries have orginisations that deal with entire areas. The US each town has to have it's own. It results in a lower quality of service. Not every town can afford x,y,z fire equipment that is only going to be used once a month but an biradge that deals with 10 towns and would be using it two times a week can.
The thing is, the solution to most of the US' problems aren't hard. They're already figured out by everyone else. We all just have to put up with hearing about the craziness that comes from the country that thinks it's great while their ass is on fire.
You started a huge nationalistic flamewar and then fueled it over and over again. Other people broke the site guidelines as well, but your account was by far the main cause, and you broke the site guidelines very badly in several places. Please don't do anything like this again.
> I think the moral of the story is America has some very serious third-world problems. The reason things like this go on in America and not in any other developed country is that Americans just accept it. "They didn't pay, so they die." Here is how much they accept it, firefighters literally stood and watched a building burn down instead of playing with their toys. Not only that, the fire department refused to accept money to put it out.
It's not just a question of money, but legal arrangements. Going into a fire isn't a game--it puts the firefighters and their equipment at risk. What does the firefighters' insurance contract look like? If one of the firefighters gets hurt, is their insurance going to cover it when the fire was outside the jurisdiction of that fire department? Insofar as this illustrates a "problem" it's not a "third-world" one, but a distinctly American one. Americans are the most legalistic people in the world, and reflexively accept the consequences of the legal state of affairs. In many other contexts, that's a strength, not a weakness.
> This whole "unincorporated land" execuse is a sad state of affairs. The whole "You're not with us, so it's not our problem" mindset is really why America is so low down on every single ranking in the world, except for military might.
Even Americans aren't so tribal as to hold grudges between towns and adjacent unincorporated land. The significance of the house being on unincorporated land is that it demarcates the legal boundaries of the fire department's jurisdiction. A public body acting outside its jurisdiction can have all sorts of consequences.
I agree with your categorization of this as a US issue,not a "3rd world" issue.
As an ex fireman, in a so-called "3rd world" [1] country, we often got involved in fires "beyond our juristriction". Our job was to put fires out, not worry about insurance or legal liability etc. We were never reprimanded for doing so, and there was never a suggestion of anything other than gratitude.
[1] 3rd world was originally the term for non-aligned nations during the cold War. The West was the "first world" (obviously), the USSR was the second world, and the rest was the 3rd world.
Not surprisingly, since a majority of the unaligned countries were in Africa, South America and Asia, 3rd World became a perjoritive term for "undeveloped" or "backward".
If being "backward" means not having the "money rules everything" approach of the USA, then long may we remain backward.
But it’s not “money rules everything.” Americans spend tremendous amounts of public money on, for example, extending the life of old people a few months. American social security is quite generous compared to other countries.
Instead in Americans are extremely rigid about rules and norms. You never just “not worry” about “legal liability.” It’s a country where criminals can sue you if they injure themselves robbing your house. For the most part, this is a good thing. Americans will also never ask you for a bribe, like is typical in the third world country I’m from.
> Americans spend tremendous amounts of public money on, for example, extending the life of old people a few months.
Medicaid is extremely stringent when it comes to income and asset thresholds for nursing homes (and in many states receiving social security can effectively disqualify you from Medicaid, even though Medicaid would be more helpful). So in many cases that public money is only applied once hospitals and nursing home facilities have plundered the estate of the soon-to-be deceased until the debt is paid or there is nothing left. Something as routine as old age will often wipe out any potential generational wealth building in all but the upper class.
I bring this up because I think this actually goes back to the original argument in the US that money does, in fact, rule everything. That's ultimately why Americans don't question their legal frameworks-- that's what guarantees the liabilities and debts and who keeps what in the end, not the other way around.
Medicaid means testing is driven by the moral belief that people should support themselves before turning to the public for help. It’s driven primarily by that moral ideology, and not a desire to save money. In other respects Medicaid is extremely generous: no co-pays, no cost-benefit calculations for treatments, etc. But Americans in many cases would rather spend more money ensuring that public support only goes to deserving people than they save by doing so.
You see this all over the place. American schools will spend $50,000/year ensuring a child with dyslexia can get individualized educational support. But they won’t give free lunches to kids whose parents could technically afford them but don’t use their money wisely.
Do we really want a system where a very elderly person, with say millions in assets, gets all their nursing home care for free in their final years, just so they can leave a bigger inheritance to their kids? I don't.
Going thru this now with my own elderly parents - I am perfectly OK with medicare ending up owning the equity left in their house, and meager other assets - to recoup money spent on their care - people should support themselves with whatever resources they have available, before taxpayers are asked to pick up the expense.
I didn't say millions in assets -- in fact, the way the system works is that those are the only people who come out with any of value to pass down to their heirs! The system is working for those people as intended; they benefit from lower costs (since everyone has to pay market price) and they are not penniless from it. The rest are drained of everything they spent their life building, and denied the opportunity to share that with their loved ones.
The thing is that death is a universal experience; Many, if not most of us, will end up needing some form of late-life care. Private insurance companies often won't cover what is ultimately inevitable. It would make sense for more of our public policy to aid in what is so common.
The average nursing home cost is $7k/mo. The average nursing home stay is 1-2 years. That's enough money to bankrupt most US families entirely yet comparatively little in the public budget. We spend _much_ more public money on incarceration every year.
>>The rest are drained of everything they spent their life building, and denied the opportunity to share that with their loved ones.
But why shouldn't they be drained of their life savings if they move into a nursing home and need to pay for care? If they have the money - any money - that is only going to be left to their heirs, why shouldn't it be used to pay for their own care?
It is an honest question - why should I inherit money from my parents estate, and the taxpayers pickup the bill for their care? If they died today, and medicare didn't claw back from their estate, there would maybe be 200K that needs to be split 5 ways - why should my siblings and I get this 'windfall' and expect the taxpayers to fund their nursing home?
Yes, fighting fires is dangerous. Can't blame the firefighters for not fighting a fire that they weren't legally or contractually required to fight, though fire departments can and do often volunteer to fight fires in other jurisdictions, so they could have (and perhaps should have, but that depends on the details of the fire).
What's wrong on a moral level about this story is that the homeowners refused to pay for the fire department, decided to live on unincorporated land, and then expected the firemen to risk their lives to save property -- not to save lives, just to save property.
We can't have a functioning society if people who opt out of paying for it demand to benefit from it anyway. If people could get away with that, nobody would pay for the fire department and it wouldn't exist. By caving in this situation, the fire department would have signaled to everyone else that it's ok to not pay.
Maybe the tax that supports the fire department ought to be mandatory? Sure, that is how it works almost everywhere in the US. People who live in places where that is not the case are doing so on purpose, and they would vote against changing it.
Want to live in the middle of nowhere and depend on the government for little or nothing? Go for it, but don't complain when you want the government's help. Want to live in a city with a lot of government services? You can do that too. At least people have a choice.
In the last year you failed to aid Ukraine in their war against Russia, failing to even provide weapons that you’d agreed to provide (but only agreeing after terms had been reached to make sure you got paid something). https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/16/ukraine-slams-germany-for-fa...
And that’s just on the continent in the last 20 years. If we were to go back to say around 1945 I’m sure we could find a couple more instances of Europeans being not so helpful.
I think it’s fair to compare only intranational affairs with other intranational affairs, as correct as you may be to point out the shortcomings. But these are apples to orange comparisons.
The public transit point is fair, but my understanding is that that is due to the right wing government, which is also the root problem in America.
This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize anyone, regardless of ability to pay. First responders- police, ambulance, fire fighters- will save any life they are able to. Preventative health care is a different story, and even that is complicated.
Unincorporated land holds a very tiny percentage of the population of the US; trying to use this as an analogy for the rest of society is just disingenuous.
> Other countries have orginisations that deal with entire areas.
So does the US. Even unincorporated land falls under the jurisdiction of whatever county it happens to be in as well as the state and federal governments; the only difference is it doesn't have a local town government... because there is no local town.
>This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize anyone, regardless of ability to pay. First responders- police, ambulance, fire fighters- will save any life they are able to. Preventative health care is a different story, and even that is complicated.
The US has the highest preventable death rate in the developed world. People die because they don't get to see a doctor. First responders will save you. However, the amount of deaths because people couldn't pay is massive for a so-called developed country. Have diabetes and no insurance? That's pretty much a death sentence and they'll watch you die. Need surgery? No insurance? No surgery and death because of complications caused by the lack of surgery.
> Unincorporated land holds a very tiny percentage of the population of the US; trying to use this as an analogy for the rest of society is just disingenuous.
As used with the multiple other examples, it's an entire culture. Not just "Oh unincorporated land, that's just crazy". It's disingenuous to act like my point is hinged on unincorporated land.
> So does the US. Even unincorporated land falls under the jurisdiction of whatever county it happens to be in as well as the state and federal governments; the only difference is it doesn't have a local town government... because there is no local town.
There are state troopers who have jurisction over certaint things. However, there is then an array of other law enforcement agencies such as towns having a police department and sheriff departments which have jurisictions over certain things. They don't have a simple police force that deals with everything in that area. This results in crimes not being truly investigated because no one is sure whose job it is.
There is no regional fire department as shown in the linked news article. The fire department that was paid by a neighbour to ensure they didn't get fire damage ignored a fire nearby because they weren't paid by someone else. The ignoring of that fire resulted in fire damage to the paying customer. A regional fire department would have dealt with that.
> The US has the highest preventable death rate in the developed world.
They also have by far the highest obesity rate in the developed world.
> Have diabetes and no insurance? That's pretty much a death sentence and they'll watch you die. Need surgery? No insurance? No surgery and death because of complications caused by the lack of surgery.
I'm supportive of universal healthcare, but this is a huge exaggeration. If policy decisions are motivated by uninformed memes like this, then if we ever do get universal healthcare, it will be a disaster.
You can buy human insulin for $25 a vial at Walmart. It's not as good, but it's what people used a couple decades ago. Countries with nationalized healthcare often have long backlogs for treatments. The cancer backlog in the UK is over 2 million people and it's continuing to grow [1]. Also, if you are insured, you're typically going to get new and more sophisticated treatments on the US compared to most places with nationalized healthcare.
That's simply untrue. My nephew is on insulin for life and he spent a long time homeless.
Where are the "reports constantly of people dying in the US because they tried to get their insulin to last them multiple days and ended up dying"? There are isolated cases where someone doesn't take care of it and dies, but it isn't widespread.
Maybe take a break from the propaganda you're reading (In Ireland, I assume?).
The problem with these emotionally charged characterizations is that they can be used against you. Conservatives will use the rationing caused by large cancer backlog in the UK as evidence for "death panels."
In the US we prefer our "death panels" to be handled by insurance companies, hospital administrators, and pharmaceutical companies. Rather than having public discourse about rationing of care we privatize our death panels and they operate in relative secrecy.
The fact that it's possible for someone to repeat what you say back to you is not a strong argument. Which of those two countries you mentioned has better health outcomes?
The funny thing is they're using the UK which is literally going nuts over the state of the NHS. The UK is extremely unhappy with the backlogs. And almost certainly they'll be getting reduced once a new goverment is voted in during the next general election. The really funny part, I bet a lower percentage of the captia die from cancer in the UK than the US. Because they can get some sort of treatment. And of course a system that treats everyone is going to have longer wait times than one that treats only a percentage of the population. And the ability to pay to avoid wait times is still there. Turns out having public and private hospitals pays off.
> The really funny part, I bet a lower percentage of the captia die from cancer in the UK than the US.
The US, quite famously, generally has the highest cancer survival rates in the world. The standard bearers for cancer survival rates in Europe have traditionally been Switzerland and France, which are close to the same level as the US. A decade ago in the UK there was a public outcry when studies showed it had one of the poorest cancer survival rates in the developed world; in the well-known Lancet study, survival rates in the US were 50% higher than the UK.
The UK has improved their cancer survival rates significantly over the last decade in response to those studies but it isn't near the top tier.
In the US, everyone gets essentially the same cancer treatments, even if they are poor. The economic stratification occurs around enrollment in experimental cancer treatments, by virtue of needing to be located where experimental therapies are being tested. Experimental therapies are a big deal in the US because most state-of-the-art treatments are developed and tested there before being widely available. If you want to enroll in experimental cancer treatments outside of where they are being tested, you need to have the economic means to travel there. I personally know people on welfare in the US who survived Stage 4 cancer because they happened to live where highly effective experimental cancer therapies were being tested, making it readily available to them.
The US lives a little bit in the future for state-of-the-art cancer treatments. I know several people that survived cancer in the US thanks to experimental therapies that are now standard therapies. It usually takes a while for these to propagate to other parts of the world.
sincere question about medical costs of that cancer survival: it seems like a standard thing to compare. if we just look at the non-experimential stuff, is there something interesting? are US treatments better? even if adjusted for costs? can we even compare them somehow? purchasing power parity, sure, and cost breakdown of states/regions, differences in coding, market sizes and thus market efficiency, regulatory compliance costs, cancer base rate (age, obesity, socioeconomic status, air quality, other factors) ... ?
Poor people in the US don't pay for their cancer treatments, the government does. They broadly use the same medical facilities as everyone else wherever they live, which do vary with locale. Some rural backwaters may not have the most advanced tech, you have to go to a city for that.
The segment of the US with most challenging cost problems are the lower-middle class. Not poor enough for the government to pay for everything while also being at risk of having little or no insurance. For people comfortably in the middle-class and up, this is much less likely to be the case.
The overall story is complicated. Demographics and health matter (not great in the US). The US medical system is profligate about speculative and preventative diagnostic tests which catch more cancers earlier (at great cost). But also early access to rapidly improving cancer treatments. It all blends together into the top-line numbers.
> The US has the highest preventable death rate in the developed world.
>> They also have by far the highest obesity rate in the developed world.
So... I am sure that is one reason of the highest preventable death rate. doesn't invalidate GP point.
> I'm supportive of universal healthcare, but this is a huge exaggeration.
Sadly in a way its not an exaggeration at all, will doctors and nurses literally watch you die of course not. If you go into the ER they legally have to stabilize you. But that's it. If I have cancer and and really sick, If they take to me to the ER, they will stabilize me but they want start treating the cancer. Even if its still early, they will watch you die over time as the cancer advances and makes you worse.
To be fair, I am certain the doctors and nurses want to treat you. But the hospital won't/can't allow it for bullshit reasons.
> You can buy human insulin for $25 a vial at Walmart. It's not as good, but it's what people used a couple decades ago.
I can't believe your defending poor people having to use worse insulin. How is that okay for you? We are talking about peoples lives, can the richest country on earth aim a little higher then throwing decades old medical knowledge at poor people to shut them up?
> I'm supportive of universal healthcare,
No you aren't, after that claim about supporting it, you spend the rest of your post shooting down universal healthcare.
> Countries with nationalized healthcare often have long backlogs for treatments. The cancer backlog in the UK is over 2 million people and it's continuing to grow [1].
> Also, if you are insured, you're typically going to get new and more sophisticated treatments on the US compared to most places with nationalized healthcare.
The UK has its issue, but from what I can see its because they are purposely starving it of money so they can ultimately privatize it.
America's health care is fucking garbage. There is no defending it, I'm so tired of spending my time calling several different companies to figure out why I am getting billed for something I shouldn't be. I'm not exaggerating either, literally one or twice a month I get the joy of calling my insurance and whatever doctor sent the bill and try and solve why my insurance won't cover it.
I agree, but it's not for a lack of spending. The US government actually spends more per capita on healthcare than the UK in total. I'm not opposed to universal healthcare. I'm opposed to politicians throwing money at a problem to buy votes, but that is the only thing that can result from a universal policy that results from healthcare at all costs rhetoric.
Completely agree, maybe if the USA got rid of the FDA and the whole concept of prescription medicine we'd be able to buy cheap medicine without the all the protectionism that the state bolts on.
> This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize anyone, regardless of ability to pay
This is the bare minimum to avoid a PR disaster. When someone is dying slowing of a chronic condition (diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease) the US system will just watch them die unless they have insurance.
It's not done for "PR". US hospitals are required to treat emergency cases, by law. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act[0], passed under President Reagan, codifies the mandate.
(This is, to my mind, what caused the United States to end up with socialized medicine-- albeit a socialized medicine system where we don't get to have public discourse about how it works.)
We don't have "socialized medicine". You can go to the ER without insurance and with signs & symptoms of a heart attack and they'll try to keep you from dying, but they won't give you the triple-bypass and medicine you need to keep it from happening again in a month—unless they think you'll be able to pay for it.
Without making any moral argument one way or the other: If people who can't pay and would otherwise die are given "free" treatment then we have socialized medicine. The costs are spread over everyone else.
Uninsured and under-insured people are cited as one reason why treatment costs are so high. Whether these cases actually contribute to costs in a substantive way doesn't stop the mandate to provide free emergency care being used as a political football.
This is hair-splitting for no reason, to the point of destroying communication. Nobody (because this is HN: yes, apparently at least one person, but you know what I mean by this) means ERs having to eat the cost of stabilizing uninsured dying/in-labor people when they say "socialized medicine". You can draw some parallels, but trying to put that, plus all the things people actually mean by the term, under the same umbrella, is a step toward making it meaningless.
This is like a burger joint telling you they don't serve onion rings, and then you insisting that in fact they do, because they put circle-cut onions on their burgers, and technically those are both rings and onions. Like... OK? So what? Which framing: "this place serves onion rings", or "this place does NOT serve onion rings", is more likely to confuse a diner?
The only times I've seen people really, seriously try to frame this as "socialized medicine" is when they don't understand how very limited the mandated scope of care is. It doesn't amount to much more than "you can't let someone simply die or give birth on the curb right outside your ER". The vast majority of what counts as medical care isn't part of it.
Where I live, in a rural area of a red state with a lot of wealth disparity, giving free medical care to anybody absolutely is seen as "socialized medicine". (Of course, there'll be a healthy dose of divisive racial and class politics mixed in to the argument, too.) The reasons behind that opinion are absolutely motivated by lack of understanding, but there are strong political beliefs there as well.
I'd like to see substantive discussion about how the US healthcare "system" really works. This is a detail that a lot of people don't know about or understand. I think the idea that "we already don't let people who can't pay just die" has a good moral argument behind it.
> Where I live, in a rural area of a red state with a lot of wealth disparity, giving free medical care to anybody absolutely is seen as "socialized medicine". (Of course, there'll be a healthy dose of divisive racial and class politics mixed in to the argument, too.) The reasons behind that opinion are absolutely motivated by lack of understanding, but there are strong political beliefs there as well.
Suburb in a red state here, grew up mostly in rural red America, so I get what you mean. I'm sure there's also a lot of thinking that free ER care is a lot more expansive than it really is, and belief that "welfare types" (ahem, cough, cough, lay-finger-along-side-of-nose) regularly use ERs to get ordinary healthcare for free. As is usually the case, I expect laying out what's actually available and how the mandate actually works tends to soften resistance to it. I'm well aware that the Left does some of this too, but god I wish right-wing media would stop misleading Republicans about how basic things like social-safety-net programs and taxes work. The death of the Fairness Doctrine, however not-entirely-comfortable I may be with the thing, has been a curse on this country, in practice.
> I'd like to see substantive discussion about how the US healthcare "system" really works. This is a detail that a lot of people don't know about or understand. I think the idea that "we already don't let people who can't pay just die" has a good moral argument behind it.
Ugh, tell me about it. I especially think the enormous proportion of medical spending that's already public isn't well-understood enough. Especially since some of those tend to cover some of the most expensive demographics—the elderly, the disabled, soldiers. Failure to grasp how our current system already works leads to those infamous "keep government out of my medicare!" protest signs and, more importantly, failure to appreciate that shifting to cover everyone with one variety or another of government-funded healthcare is actually a far less radical shift than some seem to suppose it is.
Sorry if I pounced on you there, BTW. I could have been less confrontational with that previous post.
> Sorry if I pounced on you there, BTW. I could have been less confrontational with that previous post.
It's good. The nerd pedant in me can't let a mention of EMTALA go by without hammering on it. It's a bit of cognitive dissonance to inflict on the "free healthcare market"-types who have moral qualms about letting people die but aren't about to give an inch on "socialism".
> This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize anyone, regardless of ability to pay.
It's weird that you think you've offered a retort here. A person who cannot afford medical treatment and experiences one or more of these emergency room visits followed by immediate discharge as soon as legally permissible is likely to die before their time, perhaps shortly after being discharged.
> First responders- police, ambulance, fire fighters- will save any life they are able to.
They do that sometimes when it suits them, but they certainly aren't legally obligated to.
> The reason things like this go on in America and not in any other developed country is that Americans just accept it. "They didn't pay, so they die."
The reason you think this may be because your preconceptions stopped you reading what was written. This is not what happened, and not what happens.
No. People _seek out_ unincorporated land _because_ they don't want to be beholden to city services or any of the trappings of civilization. It's like Texas as a whole, opted out of power-grid interconnection with the rest of the country, specifically so they could deregulate their industry.
And when the consequences of their actions came calling, the rest of civilization stared, agape and aghast.
Here's the question though: Should it be legal for people to opt out of these things? Can they be forced to comply? If your answer is "no sane person would opt out of fire insurance", I would agree. But sanity is in short supply in the US lately.
I would argue that it's not a question of laws in isolation, it's a question of laws perverted by brainwashed people acting against their own self-interest because they've been sold a tribal identity of exceptionalism, by America's enemies, for the purpose of weakening America, and it is working better than they possibly could have dreamed.
I think it's obvious there's a price at which point opting out of fire insurance makes sense. For unimproved land, that price might be quite low, perhaps even $0.
If you want the benefits of society you can't ignore the costs. Every home that is protected by fire departments pays taxes in the developed world, this family chose to live in unincorporated land. Btw - The fire was started by the homeowners grandson who was lighting trash on fire and afterwards the homeowners son assaulted the fire chief.
Not saying this is right, but many Americans disagree with the very concept, and want to maintain their freedom to opt-out of everything that goes along with "society". Gault's Gulch and all that. And I think it was that famous British voice of reason Maggie Thatcher that said "there's no such thing as society".
This is so frequently misquoted. Or rather, quoted away from its context and taken to mean the exact opposite. Thatcher actually argued there should be a social safety net, but it can't solve every problem and it shouldn't be used as an excuse for not working.
In full, she said [1]:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
[It] is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate … [t]hat was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system … when people come and say: ‘But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!’
Do they have a public healthcare system? Nope. What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?
Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope. That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of country says the police have no obligation to protect you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?
I could carry on but it's a bit pointless since those are two massive things. You need to remember, how fucked up the US is, is well documented. It's documented by your own media. And confirmed and defended by people like you.
No kind of society doesn't look after it's own. That's what a society is.
I don't mean to apologize for some of the awful things that go on in the United States, but your comment seems to come from the point of view of someone whose understanding of the country is built on popular media and clickbait headlines, rather than first-hand experience, if I may be so bold.
Keep in mind that what gets reported on and popularized is what sells clicks/views/etc, and is not very representative of "normal life."
It's true that services and norms vary widely across the different states, and in that sense perhaps there is not a "society" so much as "a patchwork of societies, not always working together." But I don't think it's quite the black-and-white either/or question that seems to be argued in this thread.
Here in NZ, when the Christchurch Mosque shootings happened, the Police just rammed the offender off the road and cuffed him... without firing a single shot.
Honestly I think our Police do a lot of good. There's some bad apples, there's complaints - but that is normal. Overall, they tend to make good judgement calls (most of the time).
To the defence of the US, sometimes their system does work: https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/11/24/us-jury-charge-police-off... honestly though, shooting a guy in a car that wasn't in immediate danger to anyone else around him (he rung the police originally because he was having a mental health crisis - in NZ you do call the cops if you can) so they shoot him with beanbag rounds, tase him then shoot him six times fatally. A bit over the top...
[caution: good-natured linguistic pedantry follows. Apologies in advance!]
As a point of interest, this usage of "bad apple" derives from the old folk wisdom: "one bad apple spoils the bunch".
Unlike quite a lot of old folk wisdom, this saying is literally true: mold growing on one apple will quickly jump to and colonise other nearby apples, and overripe apples emit a gas which causes other nearby fruit to ripen (and then overripen) much faster than normal; so it's important not to store overripe/moldy apples together with regular fruit!
Anyhow, my point is just this: "bad apples" doesn't mean that something is in the minority and therefore doesn't have much effect and can be safely ignored -- it means that something is in the minority but is likely to infect everything around it if urgent action isn't taken to separate them. If that wasn't your intended meaning, then "bad apples" was definitely the wrong metaphor to reach for. :)
> It comes from reading/listening/etc the responses of Americans to all the crazy shit that happens there.
Right, no disagreement from me that these things happen. And responses are varied, as you say.
What I was trying to get across was that you get a very lopsided view by concentrating on "crazy shit" and people's responses to it.
For example:
I live in the US. It's snowing where I am. It makes things beautiful. Some birds are at the feeder, and the furnace just turned on. I'm thankful for the warmth. I have some cookies to deliver to the neighbors later on (they recently gave us a loaf of their bread, which was delicious).
----
There you go, that was some real American culture (still second-hand for you, and admittedly not entirely representative). Not very interesting, but it's home. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of people, and yes, sprinkle in a handful of crazy shit too for good measure. Maybe that gets you a little bit closer to reality.
Still plenty that needs fixing, of course. And I'm glad I don't live in Mississippi (:
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You don't get to declare by fiat what constitutes a society, or what counts as "taking care of its own". Nor do you get to just help yourself to the assumption that other countries, which claim to have things like "a public healthcare system" and "police who have a duty to save you", actually have those things.
As for "well documented", if you believe what the media tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no position to judge anyone else.
As for "confirmed and defended", since it's impossible to have a government that actually does the things you claim, of course I can "confirm" that the US doesn't. And of course I'll defend freedom, particularly when that means explaining what freedom actually means to people who don't understand it.
>As for "well documented", if you believe what the media tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no position to judge anyone else.
They show video footage... Jesus christ, you've bought into the Trump propaganda of fake news so much you're just saying believing the media is foolish. This whole the media is lying wasn't such a thing before Trump.
Video footage can tell you that some small group of people did some particular things at some particular time and place.
Video footage cannot tell you what isn't on the video. Which is the vast majority of what the vast majority of actual Americans do with their time every day. Which does not look at all like your media-inspired, uniformed caricature.
> This whole the media is lying wasn't such a thing before Trump.
Excuse me? The media has always lied. The evidence for that is overwhelming for anyone who actually cares to look.
Decades ago, we had no way of knowing about the extent of lies being told to us by the media (and by our politicians, for that matter) at the time they were told to us, because we had no other sources of information. Now we do. We can spot the lies told to us by all of our so-called "trusted" sources, just as they can spot lies told to us by Trump. There are no genuinely trustworthy sources of information. I agree that sucks, but it's the fact, and trying to ignore it or sugar coat it just makes it worse.
The US is built on a fundamental distrust of mainstream authority. Our founders were religious radicals who thrived as long as they were exiled someplace where they couldn't affect anybody who mattered. Our folk heroes are dimwitted-but-clever rebels who defeat all the experts with old-fashioned know-how. The Russians sent men to space essentially as cargo for the mathematicians back on Earth to work out; we sent seat-of-your-pants pilots, and arguably our most memorable space mission was the one that got screwed up until our team improvised their way to victory. We proudly pay cash to lawn-mowers and restaurant servers we like so they can hide it from the taxman. So given all that, why would we ever meekly hand our humanity, our free will, to the bureaucrats in the police department or hospitals, just so that they can abuse it more efficiently?
German here. We do have a public healthcare system. That we can opt out of and go private. The trade-off is it being increasingly hard to get back into the public one, especially as people get older and thus more "expensive".
Insurances (including fire service or roadside assistance) has to be payed. You cannot just opt back into it once you need it. If parent is right and they had chances to opt into fire service but decided not to, you cannot just bill them for a single instance. Otherwise they're behavior would be reward, and everyone else had incentive to do the same.
Being older than 55 is the big one. Those making very little money can join a family insurance of their significant other. Or find a loophole, like getting into the public system of another country, then moving back.
For those younger, it seems to be mostly about not earning a lot. Here the limits are even smaller for those already private in 2002.
> Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope. That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of country says the police have no obligation to protect you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?
What country puts that kind of positive obligation on the police? I'm not aware of any that do.
That's true, and that's true of other first-world nations, too. America has plenty of problems. However, this fire brigade isn't one of them. It they work through insurance then, if you havent paid the insurance, you shouldn't be suprised when they don't put out your fire.
I was a volunteer fire fighter for a while, and I did it because 1.) I'm kind of an idiot about danger, and 2.) I think it's important to help others.
There are many other people in the US that will go to ridiculous lengths to help others.
> Not only that, the fire department
>refused to accept money to put it out.
It that's how it's supposed to work? Your building catches fire, the F.D. rolls up, and you hand them $75 right there? Are they supposed to carry cash in case you don't have exact change? Set up a stripe account so they can take credit or debit?
They have a water gun. They chose not to stand at a safe distance shooting water into a burning building. Because... water is too expensive to waste on these people who didn't pay their taxes or whatever. Instead, they chose to stand at a safe distance, not shooting their water gun, and just watch the building reduced to ash.
I see you are doubling down on belittling the work of others. In an unincorporated area (that is to say a place where erecting a domicile is not supported and yet also not forbidden) the firefighters may not have water for a "water gun," as you say.
If they had access to water, a standoff approach with "a water gun" would only control the fire from spreading more broadly than building and damage the structure through inundation. If the structure was salvable, then the work of a firefighter is to control combustion to extinction using tools to manage the movement of air and other gases so building materials stop burning and do not reignite. It is a close-in effort.
>The reason things like this go on in America and not in any other developed country is that Americans just accept it. "They didn't pay, so they die."
Your argument is based on a false premise. Nobody died. In a life/death situation, the fire fighters will do whatever is necessary to attempt to save lives, but they aren't worried about a structure that a homeowner chose not to protect.
In your country, if someone chooses not to insure a home, will the government rebuild it for free? What's the difference? I'm assuming the non-indigent case where someone can afford to pay the insurance. If someone is indigent they probably don't own a house. If it is government housing, then it of course would be rebuilt by the government.
There are plenty of problems in the US, but you have greatly exaggerated this particular issue.
The question is: on one hand, any sane adult should be able to make whatever decision they want regarding their own health and property (some text in small font goes here).
On the other hand no sane adult will refuse medical insurance: it's an outright suicidal behavior, unless you have a seven-digit sum in your account.
I don’t think this person actually has much experience with local governance in the US, because collectivized responsibility and mutual aid is a hallmark of basically every local government I’ve experienced, across the US.
Pass the guacymolo.
As an aside, “You're not with us, so it's not our problem” could better be stated as “you organized your entire life around not contributing to the collective welfare by dodging taxes in unincorporated land, then not contributing to the fire brigade.” The state should not incentivize people to engage in the worst antisocial behavior, and giving services to tax dodgers who should know better is a seriously misaligned incentive.
Perhaps life insurance companies should pay out to anyone who signs up and pays $20 from their deathbeds?
This didn't happen. A building burned but everybody was fine. Had lives been at risk, the firefighters would have intervened. The "moral" you are taking from this story is predicated on gross misinformation.
No, the moral of this story is you taking a single part massively out of context. And the fire department didn't go out. So they wouldn't have known if someone's life was at risk. So stop you're nonsense.
Again, more misinformation! They did go out, and made sure the fire didn't spread off the property. If anybody had been imperiled, the firefighters would have helped. FFS, it's right in that article:
> They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn," Cranick said.
And if the firefighters were rude to these people, it's probably because the people who lived there were a bunch of anti-social shitheads and the firefighters knew it. But the firefighters did go out anyway. Stop your nonsense.
No, they went out after the neighbour phoned up because of a fire on their property. Anyone who has fully read the article will know that. So stop your nonsense.
"Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee."
So the fire department was contacted, did not hear of any lives at risk, and did not show up. What an entirely reasonable response to getting a service request from someone who has not established a SLA with your company.
Do you personally work at a company? If so, I demand you to help me fix a problem I'm having. I haven't paid you, but that shouldn't matter. What's that? You won't help me? But you helped my competitor who did establish a contract with you in which they paid you a monthly fee in exchange for a guarantee you'd help them when the needed it.
The horror. The absolute travesty. Society has failed.
> So the fire department was contacted, did not hear of any lives at risk, and did not show up.
The article doesn't say that does it. They say the fire department was contacted and responded that they weren't on the list. They refused to accept any payment. And only turned up when someone who was on the list called.
The claim “firefighters wouldn’t come if someone’s life was in danger from a fire” is extraordinary. The evidence “firefighters didn’t come when no one’s life was in danger from a fire” isn’t.
that the firefighters didn't know if anyone's live was in danger because they didn't show up.
The evidence is
that they refused to show up when called and only showed up when called by someone else. Without being prescene at the scene it is not possible for a firefigther to know if someone's life is endanger or not because the person calling isn't trained to know that.
The real evidence for the very basic claim is there.
> Without being prescene at the scene it is not possible for a firefigther to know if someone's life is endanger or not because the person calling isn't trained to know that.
Yeah... that's about the weakest argument I've heard this week. Firefighters don't have magical spidey senses to tell them whether someone is trapped in a burning building. They will go based on what the homeowner says -- it doesn't take special training to verify that 3 people live at your house and all of them are on the road with you watching it burn.
Fire department certainly isn't risking life and limb to comb through an actively burning building verifying it to be empty when the homeowner themselves already said it was.
>that the firefighters didn't know if anyone's live was in danger because they didn't show up.
Person: Hello, my house is on fire come save it please.
FireDepartment: Is anyone's life in danger?
Person: No.
FireDepartment: Thank you for letting me know.
That's how easy it is, same conversation would happen whether or not they were on "the list".
There is approximately a zero percent chance the 911 operator neglected to ask if anybody was in the burning house. They didn't save the house but they did show up anyway to contain the fire.
The claim of callous disregard for human life you're making about American firefighters is completely unsupported by evidence. The closest example you have is case where nobody was harmed. But we've already established that you don't let facts interfere with your narratives.
Just because the person on the phone doesn't know if there is someone in the house does not remove the possibilities. But that isn't the only way there could be a risk to life from a fire. There are many things a firefighter is trained in to be able to correctly judge the risk to life. A 911 operator is not a trained firefighter. Dismissing the training of firefighters have is very disappointing.
The person on the phone often doesn't have all the info. It often happens that fire department only discover a risk to life upon arriving where someone mentions that someone is in the house. Or that X,Y,Z is there.
Someone phoned the fire department. The fire department didn't visit because they weren't on a list. The person who was making the decision if there was a risk to life was not on scene nor trained to make that decision. Someone dies the lawsuit would be massive for that level of incomptence.
Even if we take your points at face value, which other comments clearly don't, you seem to be coming from a rather ethnocentric perspective. It seems that you value "solving problems" above other things, I'd hazard that your personal philosophy can be categorized as negative utilitarianism. This isn't a universally shared perspective. There are many other worldviews that prioritize other things besides reducing suffering. In the case of the US, it seems to me that Americans value individual liberty over ameliorating suffering. These values do in fact come into conflict often, and there's no one "right" answer.
This is a case of a family who chose to live on unincorporated land because they wanted less government protection. It's a severe edge case involving very individual circumstances. You can't make any conclusions about the US from this.
I wasn't able to find it again but there also people in Germany who lack health insurance due to an inability to pay and must rely on charity clinics. These are mostly elderly Germans who paid into a private system, foregoing the public system, and eventually lost health insurance after their earnings declined. It's just the US that has these "third world problems."
>Here is how much they accept it, firefighters literally stood and watched a building burn down instead of playing with their toys.
I assume insurance of any kind doesn't exist in the rest of the world, since everyone else would have long figured out that you just don't need to pay it and then reap the rewards afterwards by just claiming it then? Or would insurance companies in Europe just stand by with their big bank accounts and refuse to pay? Sad state of affairs, very third world of them.
The alternative is they wouldn't be allowed to live there. America allows people to get into situations that may result in harm to them if they are not careful. We do the same thing with healthcare and our nutrition. We still allow tons of processed and sugary food even though we know it will result in slamming our healthcare system but hopefully you have insurance.
>This whole "unincorporated land" execuse is a sad state of affairs. The whole "You're not with us, so it's not our problem" mindset is really why America is so low down on every single ranking in the world, except for military might.
I'm really curious where you're from.
On the specific point of unincorporated land, I think you're vastly underestimating how physically large the US is.
For example, Rovaniemi seems pretty isolated from the rest of Europe, right?
It's level of isolation (both in terms of distance to the next large city and hospitability of the land in between) is similar to Las Vegas. Salt Lake City isn't too far off either. America is huge.
The US just has too much empty land to offer urban-level fire services to everyone who chooses to live in the country side. It's logistically not possible. So instead if you choose to live in the wilderness, you can also choose to pay for protection, but if you don't, then I'm not sure exactly what your expectations are.
In terms of 'whataboutism' - Europe (assuming that's where you are) sure loves shedding the responsibility for the chaos they caused in the colonies, while living in buildings paid for by/made out of materials physically stolen from those colonies.
> It's level of isolation (both in terms of distance to the next large city and hospitability of the land in between) is similar to Las Vegas. Salt Lake City isn't too far off either. America is huge.
Right. The issue isn't so much that "America lets people die because they don't pay." It's that "America gives people the freedom to live in the middle of fucking nowhere, including where a state or local government can't reasonably commit to offering reliable emergency services."
>Every other country has communities that live so far from anyone that they're in trouble if they have a heart attack. But you know what? They still have something. House burning down? The local volunteer fire fighters will help you out.
You are revealing your lack of knowledge about the American wilderness simply by stating this. The US is so vast that there are massive swaths of land that you could not get a fire truck to the scene in half a day. It is difficult to imagine such a place if you have spent your life living in a heavily urbanized European country with no actual wilderness (I've seen what Germans and French call 'wilderness' and it is actually a medium-sized park)
The US operates on a fundamentally different scale from most other countries. It's so big and diverse (in terms of both people and biomes) that the only effective way to organize is heavily federated. Fire laws in California are very different from in Tennessee. There are a few ways to accurately paint Americans in broad strokes, but not many.
I'd encourage you to travel around America a bit. Foreigners are often shocked by how nice and helpful people are here. Americans are by far the most financially charitable people in the world [1] but can be famously neighborly in many more ways than that.
America has the largest amount of recorded donations to their rather stretched legal definition of a "charity". This says a lot more about the American tax code than it does about American generosity. I'd encourage you to travel around the world a bit.
The linked scenario was controversial because this one small town of 2,500 chose to not help (vs. the standard practice of other towns that do help). Then the national outcry from the rest of America caused them to change it.
Wherever you're from, I'd love to use a town of 2,500's actions to define the morality of your country...
"America is HUUUGE" comes up everytime someone says anything at all.
Too many guns? America is huge.
Urban sprawl? America is huge.
No trains? America is huge.
The US is #4 in terms of total area, behind russia, canada and china, and closely followed by brazil and australia. If the others manage at least some of this stuff, one would imagine that the US can do it at least as well.
Do you have any familiarity with those countries and where people live?
Do you really think that metrics on quality of life in Krasnoyarsk Krai or Northwest Territories are drastically better than Wyoming?
I wont even get started on what life is like in Xinjiang.
EDIT: Also, you're saying that Australia, Canada, Russia and Brazil have good train infrastructure? And getting even more pedantic, you're a fan of the trains west of Chengdu?
The trains in Xinjiang compare very favourably with those in the US. The media paints a very one-sided picture of what life is like there; not to defend the CCP's awful actions, but if the way certain communities in St Louis get treated were reported the same way...
You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
You've unfortunately been posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments in other places too. Would you please stop? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we eventually have to ban accounts that do it.
So what's your point? A comparable part of the US railway network is what, Chicago to Denver: 10% less distance, 33% slower even over that shorter distance (much the same as the non-high-speed trains in Xianjing), 1/4 as frequent (and that's only if we ignore that Xianjing also has the slower trains) - and significantly less punctual IME (to say nothing of nicer to ride).
My point is that over that distance, any train is impractical?
Like sure China has fast trains in a small area, but west of Chengdu, they don’t, so saying “China is a country nearly as large as the US with a robust train network” is a red herring.
The US is much more spread out than China or Russia, even if land areas are of similar scale.
This supports the original point that it’s hard for large countries to have robust train networks, which was the idea that was being challenged.
> My point is that over that distance, any train is impractical?
It is practical though. Those 21 trains a day to/from Urumqi aren't running empty; I'm sure part of the motivation was national pride (as with most megaprojects anywhere), but those high speed lines were built primarily because they're useful.
> Like sure China has fast trains in a small area, but west of Chengdu, they don’t
And yet, as per your own link and my response, train service west of Chengdu is still significantly better than in the US. The US being big and spread out is just an excuse.
All I was saying was that the easiest argument to shut down a discussion is to invoke the fact that "America is huge". Nothing can be done, bc it's huge, end of story.
Haha. No. Just because you dislike Russia and you think Russia is completely incompetent doesn't remove the fact they don't have problems of people phoning up for a fire department and not getting help.
Right, that's why our elections always come down to a 50.001% majority, because if you let the majorities be bigger it's more expensive to turn them into a minority when they turn against you.
It's not a person-vote-majority, but some sort of aggregate. Due to the aggregation scheme it becomes even easier to manipulate/game with "key counties" and "key states". A party does not even need to convince the general population anymore, but just focus on a tiny fraction.
No, you have this backwards. Acting like a grownup means taking responsibility for your own actions and not expecting the government, or any institution, to magically make sure nothing bad ever happens to you. Paying for services like firefighting is fine; but being forced to pay for things because some government bureaucrat decrees it is not.
And acting like a grownup also means letting people take the consequences of their decisions. According to other posters in this thread, the family in question repeatedly refused to pay a fair price for firefighting coverage, and the fire was started by a family member. That means the consequences are on them.
Acting like a grownup means that you realize that not all things that happen to people are their own fault and that you yourself can’t totally avoid bad things no matter how careful you are. It also means to understand that some things can be handled much better by a shared effort instead of everybody on their own. That’s why we have police, firefighters and the military.
Police, firefighters, and military don't have to be provided by governments. There are plenty of historical examples of all three being provided by private institutions (indeed, the article referenced in this discussion talks about such institutions for firefighters in England over a period of several centuries).
Nor does charity for those in genuine need need to be provided by governments. Indeed, charity throughout human history has worked best when it is provided by private institutions made up of people who genuinely want to help others, of which there are plenty in the US as there are everywhere, not by government departments staffed by bureaucrats.
I think this is exactly where reasonable people disagree. Some (myself included) feel that acting like a grownup means exactly that everything that nature (not other people) inflicts on you is your responsibility. This includes your house catching on fire or your person contracting a disease.
I'm not so sure - entire revolutions have been had about this, and extensive documents written, for centuries[1]. Not everyone is a negative utilitarian.
I value living a society where cooperation is (maximally) voluntary. Involuntary cooperation is indistinguishable from a degree of slavery.
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
Point being that liberty itself is a value that it is reasonable to optimize over negative utilitarianism.
This is actually the main point of contention. Prior to United States v. Butler, the government's power to provide general welfare was limited/narrowly interpreted. Whether individual liberty supersedes general welfare or vice versa is the main disagreement. My point is only that reasonable people can disagree about this.
Adults know that making sensible collective agreements where necessary is not the same thing as government. Governments never limit themselves to that. Certainly the US government doesn't--even though that's exactly what it's supposed to do under the Constitution.
Also, allowing people to suffer bad consequences from their own choices does not mean being indifferent. It just means refusing to adopt a "cure" that is worse than the disease.
Adults also know that collective agreements to provide the means to help those who are in trouble through no fault of their own are called "charity", and are best done by private institutions made up of people who genuinely want to help others (and there are plenty of those in the US just as there are everywhere), not government departments staffed by bureaucrats.
> Adults also know that collective agreements to provide the means to help those who are in trouble through no fault of their own are called "charity", and are best done by private institutions
While your other arguments are subjective, this one is just plain factually wrong. It will always be far less efficient to depend on a few individuals to shoulder large expenses or for disparate organizations (each with their own overhead expenses) to find and collect smaller contributions than it is for everyone to pay just a small amount automatically to collectively cover an expense through a single origination.
In addition to the massive inefficiencies of charity, and the fact that many charities are really little more than scams, there are still several other problems with them. See for example:
Some of these problems are even seen by some people as benefits. For example, federal or state aid to victims of a natural disaster would go to help everyone impacted, but a charity to help them can allow someone to only support certain people while discriminating against others. Some people actually find it extremely preferable to restrict all their charitable giving to only people with a certain religion, or skin color, or political alignment, but the freedom that gives a person to leave "the wrong kind of people" to suffer is still a massive problem when your goal is to help everyone impacted.
Charity is great, when it's not a total scam, and it's equitable, and the origination is lucky enough to find enough people willing to take the time to research them and give them enough donations to accomplish what needs to be done, but it's still no substitute for government programs.
Government programs can have their problems too certainly. They can be run poorly, they can not do enough to help people, and the help they provide can be less than equitable, but you're entitled to a much higher level of control and transparency over government programs and you always have the ability to vote for improvements and hold the government accountable when they fail to deliver.
>* It will always be far less efficient to depend on a few individuals to shoulder large expenses or for disparate organizations (each with their own overhead expenses) to find and collect smaller contributions than it is for everyone to pay just a small amount and collectively cover an expense through a single origination.*
On the assumption that the single organization will actually do the job, perhaps. But it won't. Ask anyone who has actual experience with such government organizations, as, for example, my wife and I have (she far more than me--she was a social worker for 20 years). They don't actually help the people they're supposed to help.
So your claim is factually wrong, not mine. I did not claim that private charities are perfect. I only claimed that charity is best done by private institutions, i.e., that on net they do better than government programs.
Government doesn't always work as well as it should, but you have the power to change that. You can vote for changes and hold your elected officials accountable. That's the strength of government solutions. You and those around you come together to vote on what needs to be done, how it should be done, and who is responsible for overseeing that.
I also have family who worked in social services and they always wished they could do more to help people, but too many of the people around them were preventing that. Too many people voted against plans to increase funding and refused to hold officials responsible perhaps because of the letter next to that official's name, or because they didn't want to help "the wrong kinds of people" at all, or because they thought as you do that charity is enough to fix everything. If charities were the answer they'd have already stepped in to fill all the gaps left over after the government has done what it can, but of course they haven't.
This is the main weakness of government programs. They depend on people working together and holding their elected officials accountable. People vote against government programs, and refuse to hold anyone accountable, and then complain when the programs don't solve their problems and use that as evidence that the whole system can't work, but it's still clearly the most efficient way to solve many problems, and often the only way some people are currently getting any help at all. Improving it just requires us to put in the effort.
> You can vote for changes and hold your elected officials accountable. That's the strength of government solutions.
No, it's the weakness of government solutions. If I want to help people, I can start a private charity and go help people. If I want to government to help people, I have to get a majority of the country to vote for politicians that will make that happen--assuming there even are any.
> You and those around you come together to vote on what needs to be done, how it should be done, and who is responsible for overseeing that.
If you believe people should be helped, you can go help them. If you and a bunch of your friends all believe that, so much the better: you can get together to help more people. This is how helping is supposed to work, and how it has worked all through human history when it has actually worked at all.
If you want the government to force everybody to pay for helping people, you are imposing your value judgments on them. That's not how freedom is supposed to work. It's also lazy on your part: you say you want to help people, but instead of actually doing the work of helping--figuring out the individual needs of individuals who need help, deciding whether they deserve to be helped, and then doing what is needed to help them--you're punting it to a government bureaucracy. Which, as I have already said, won't actually do it anyway. And it's no answer to that to say that, if only people would just vote the right way, governments would magically change. That utopian vision has never worked.
> Improving it just requires us to put in the effort.
Your efforts would be much better directed at helping people yourself, than trying to use government force to do it.
> If you believe people should be helped, you can go help them.
I could, but how is that better? If there's a natural disaster on the other side of the country and I can see that people need help should I immediately pack up my car with water bottles, food, and blankets and drive for three or four days to "go help them?"
I have responsibilities here too. I have a job and a family who need me here. Should I just leave them at a moment's notice? And not just me, you want everyone to do this? Have thousands of people drop everything they are responsible for to drive however many days/hours it takes to "go help"? Getting to the people who need the help in a timely manner would be hard enough, but imagine the roads being blocked by all the traffic at a time when emergency responders are trying to work. Clearly my efforts are not better directed at helping people myself.
It's stupidly inefficient for everyone to respond to people in need by going to help them. It's sure as hell not how it's "supposed to work" and that's why we've set up the response systems that we have. We need to depend on others to do the helping so that we can contribute to their efforts while still living our lives and without wasting massive amounts of time and resources causing new problems.
Because we're stuck depending on others to help collect needed supplies and funding, coordinate with local emergency response teams, and disseminate whatever aid is needed the fewer organizations we task with doing all that the better and more efficiently it all works.
> than trying to use government force to do it.
"The government" isn't forcing anyone to help people. It's your neighbors, my neighbors, and everyone around and between us choosing to help others. We decided we want state and federal aid for people who need it. It wasn't even a decision we made one time, we continuously decide that it's the best way to handle aid. If we ever change our minds and decide that everyone packing up their cars and rushing in to personally deliver assistance is preferable we can vote to stop it. No one is forcing us, it was our choice. You might not agree with it, but that's just life in a democracy. Collectively we may choose things you don't personally care for, and thank goodness because it sounds like you haven't really thought through your "Everyone go help whoever they think needs it directly" strategy at all.
> It's stupidly inefficient for everyone to respond to people in need by going to help them.
By "go help them" I did not mean literally drop what you're doing at any moment. I meant, set up private means to help people, funded by volutary contributions. That would entail some people actually physically going to help, but not everyone involved. A private institution could take all of the measures you describe as being more efficient. Indeed, historically private institutions have done so. The monopolization of "helping people" by governments, on the theory (mistaken--see below) that governments can do it more efficiently, is a fairly recent development.
> "The government" isn't forcing anyone to help people.
Yes, it is. No one has the option of not paying their taxes because they don't agree with what the government is doing with the money. Try that and you will go to jail. That's force. All government laws and policies are backed up by force and the threat of force.
> It's your neighbors, my neighbors, and everyone around and between us choosing to help others.
No, it isn't. What that would look like is not passing laws. What it would look like is you, your neighbors, and everyone else who agreed with you forming a private institution to help others, funded by voluntary contributions.
> You might not agree with it, but that's just life in a democracy.
In other words, you agree that democracy forces some people to pay for things they do not support. Thank you. But you realize, of course, that you are contradicting your earlier statement that the government isn't forcing anyone to help people.
> it sounds like you haven't really thought through your "Everyone go help whoever they think needs it directly" strategy at all.
On the contrary, you are the one who hasn't thought through your position, because, aside from contradicting yourself (see above), you are helping yourself to the extremely implausible (I could say "demonstrably false", but I'll go easy on you for now) claims that (1) democratic processes as they actually exist in our country and others actually do a good job of giving all viewpoints a fair hearing and deciding questions on the merits and not on irrelevant grounds of political expediency or cronyism or... (I could go on and on), and (2) that the government programs that result from these democratic processes actually do what they are ostensibly created to do, and (3) that they do it more efficiently (i.e., with more actual good done per dollar contributed by the people) that private charitable institutions would.
It's precisely because I have thought through these things, and have seen, through both first-hand experience and through looking at the overall performance of government programs in general, that all three of the above claims are false, that I have come to the views I have been expressing.
Sorry but I do not believe this. The paper rings a lot of alarm bells. It provides very little evidence for the actual thesis it is trying to prove and provides ample evidence that seem related to the thesis it is trying to prove but in fact it does nothing to prove it. Thus, the paper provides plenty of evidence that insurance companies helped each other to fight fires at sites insured by their fellow insurance companies, and then subsequently reimbursed each other for these efforts, but that of course has no bearing on what the paper is trying to prove.
Usually commonly held widely believed oral histories emerge for a good reason. So if it was commonly believed that insurance companies let un-insured buildings burn, then it is likely to be true at least part of the time.
Also, lets look at the source -- he is an "archive and heritage consultant", i.e. someone that solicits money for his research. Is he getting paid for this article? Is he writing this in the hopes that he will advertise his services for insurance companies?
> Usually commonly held widely believed oral histories emerge for a good reason. So if it was commonly believed that insurance companies let un-insured buildings burn, then it is likely to be true at least part of the time.
Yes, oral histories emerge for a reason, but that reason doesn't have to be "because it was literally true". There are countless oral traditions that are complete nonsense! Urban legends existed 200 and 2000 years ago just as much as they do today, and no historian would ever claim that you should take every oral history at face value.
> Also, lets look at the source -- he is an "archive and heritage consultant", i.e. someone that solicits money for his research. Is he getting paid for this article? Is he writing this in the hopes that he will advertise his services for insurance companies?
He was paid by a prominent YouTuber to find out whether a video said YouTuber made several years ago was incorrect[0]. That doesn't scream "conflict of interest" to me.
Originally writing in 1692-3, Daniel Defoe noted that the firemen were “very active and diligent” in helping to put out fires, “whether in houses insured or not insured”.[33] Insurance companies’ instructions to their firemen were clear – they were to attend and help extinguish “all” fires. [34], [35]
What specific issue with this do you have? Do you disagree with the content of “Of Assurances”, in An Essay upon Projects? Or the Union Fire Office Board Minutes?
I can't speak for the person you replied to, but I don't think the quote you provided really invalidates the point.
Maybe you two are talking past each other. One way to phrase the core question is: "did fire companies let competitors' buildings burn, regularly, as standard practice?" And I think the evidence in the article pretty strongly indicates "No." I think that's what you're referring to.
Another way to phrase the core question is: "Did it ever happen, at various points in history, that fire companies let competitors' buildings burn?" And I think the article indicates that it very well may have. And the possibility was absolutely used as a threat, even if it never actually came to pass.
I feel like even a handful of such incidents would have been so terrible as to get etched into social memory and passed on, and I think that's the sort of thing the person you are replying to was referring to.
I think it's an article where you need some context.
A relative is a retired fire chief of a city department and overall fire buff. He's spent 15 years engrossed in this stuff for various cities in the US - the answers vary! Usually in the 19th century there were different types of fire service. A fire brigade or volunteer company focused on protecting the city or subscribers, and protective companies who salvaged buildings or contents of buildings. Sometimes they worked differently in different places, and you need to understand the context of precisely when and where you are talking about.
Keep in the mind the nature of 18th and 19th century buildings - often row houses, often with shared attics, etc. Protecting property, then and now might mean sacrificing some buildings to protect others. Consider the destruction of San Francisco... when the leaders of the city fire department were all killed, and underground water cisterns damaged by the earthquake, a madman Army officer blew up half the city to "save" it.
The property insurance folks had a first priority to save the contents of a house - they may be dragging the piano and hutch out of a house while the house 3 doors down burned. Or they may have helped. From the perspective of contemporary eyewitnesses, what they report and write down may vary.
There's a significant percentage of people (even here on HN) that believes "Facebook sold personal information to Cambridge Analytica and they used this information to win the election for Trump".
My prior is that people repeat good stories somewhat independently of their truth value. Older stories that are hard to verify are more suspect. I think we should default to skepticism.
I'll bite — so what did happen with Cambridge Analytica?
As far as I can tell[1], the only thing wrong with what you said is "Facebook sold...", where in reality, the data was surreptitiously gathered. Or are you referring to something else?
So maybe a fair re-phrasing would be: "Facebook provided personal information to Cambridge Analytica and they used this information to assist the Trump campaign"
With the understanding that (1) the data was taken without the permission of all people impacted (i.e. if your friend installed the app and gave their permission, then you could be affected), and (2) it's debatable how effective the data actually was for the campaign.
I think the "public Facebook APIs" descriptor is a little off — Facebook viewed it as a data breach and apologized (and got sued, and fined, etc). So it was pretty shady, not just simple above-board access.
Around that era I used those APIs to build a somewhat novel (and not very successful) dating site where you could play matchmaker for your friends based on their likes. I assure you, the API was public.
At some point Facebook started getting flak for having APIs that grant access to data-about-friends. There are a couple ways of looking at this; one way is "I didn't grant my friends permission to share my data with an app!" the other is "you shared your data with friends via Facebook, what does it matter if they use the FB UI or some other app". It's a can of worms but I don't think anyone would call it a breach.
Ok, fair enough — was a public API at the time, which was subsequently removed/limited and apps that had been using it in that way were termed "abusive".
And I should correct myself that the phrase used by Zuck[1] was "breach of trust" not "data breach," though several other sources (articles, etc[2]) at the time did in fact use the term "data breach."
As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was an incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few. There's no way anyone was going to waste it on young, inexperienced children".
Nearly every source we had saying that the crusade involved children came much later, after a few writers referred to the same source with a mistranslation (think reading "me and the boys" as referring to actual children).
But people spent 500 years discussing the horrors of the children's crusade without ever really questioning if it happened.