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Remember the movies/books about the mafia? If you needed “protection,” you paid for it. Well, they’re baaaaaaaaaaaaack. Only this time it is called, protection from fire and you had better buy it...or else...poof! thar she goes!

Oh, I remember the word I was looking for: EXTORTION!

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

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

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

Good news for fires...bad news for humans.

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

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

You said it Mr. Mayor!  That'll larn 'em!

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

Now that was an inconsiderate fire! It took way too long! Marshmallows, anyone?

Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.

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

What a dreamer!

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

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

Have you heard of a human being  NOT treated based on whether he had health insurance? We're not there YET...I don't think we're there yet...please tell me I'm right....please....

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

At this juncture I want to share a story from my "Little LuLu" comics...In this story the authorities were taxing the "air." Little LuLu didn't have any money to buy air so she was holding her breath.


In the next box Little LuLu was blue.That's as violent as we got in those days.

I don't remember how it ended. Hey! Give me a break...I was a kid!