INTRODUCTION
So far as direct influence on current affairs is concerned, the influence of the political philosopher may be negligible. But when his ideas have become common property, through the work of historians and publicists, teachers and writers, and intellectuals generally, they effectively guide developments.
—Friedrich Hayek1
The fire department was run by idealists. That is why it ignored the homeowner’s pleas and watched his house burn down.
He had neglected to pay his bill. What happened then tells us a lot about libertarianism, the increasingly influential philosophy of minimal government. Many libertarians took it to show the stern seriousness of their ideal. Their enemies on the left thought it revealed how repugnant it is to leave such important matters to the market. Both sides thought that it revealed the essence of the libertarian tradition. Both were wrong.
Obion County, Tennessee, uses the fire protection services of the nearby City of South Fulton. But the county doesn’t contract with the city on behalf of all its residents. It leaves them each to pay a seventy-five-dollar fee to the city. Fire protection in the county is essentially privatized: it is up to individual homeowners to contract with the city fire department.
Gene Cranick, who lives in Obion County, had paid the fee for years. In 2010 he forgot. His grandson burned some trash in his backyard, and the fire got out of control and began to spread. Cranick called 911, but the operator told him the fire department would not come. His wife told the operator that she would pay “whatever the cost,” but that was not an option. The department arrived several hours later, when the fire threatened the house of a neighbor who had paid. It sprayed the neighbor’s land up to, but not across, Cranick’s property line. Three dogs and a cat died. Cranick’s son punched the fire chief and was arrested.
Glenn Beck, the conservative radio and television host, explained why the department had done the right thing. In America, “we are going to start to have to have these kinds of things.” It would have been wrong to put out the fire. “If you don’t pay your seventy-five dollars, then that hurts the fire department. They can’t use those resources and you would be sponging off of your neighbor’s seventy-five dollars.” Soon there would be no fire protection: “As soon as they put out the fire of somebody who didn’t pay the seventy-five bucks, no one will pay the seventy-five bucks.”2 Jonah Goldberg, writing in National Review Online, said that letting the home burn was “sad,” but he thought that it would “probably save more houses over the long haul,” since people will now have a strong incentive to pay their fees. Other conservative writers soon converged on the same view.3
The fire chief was not, so far as is known, an ideologue or a philosopher. But the decision to let the house burn reflected two key tenets of libertarianism: that people are appropriately understood to be on their own in the world, responsible for their own fate, and that need does not make a claim on others’ resources.4 Beck thought that the fire illustrated the importance of those principles, and that those principles had implications for the then-pressing debate about Obamacare: its protection of people with preexisting medical conditions created the same perverse incentives that saving Cranick’s house would. The same principle demanding that houses be allowed to burn also entailed that millions of people should be allowed to go without health care.
The broader philosophy that Beck embraces would radically transform our society. In modern America, government protects people from not only fire and disease but also dangerous workplace conditions and toxins in the environment. It provides education, maintains roads and bridges, funds medical research and disaster relief. It protects against destitution through Social Security, unemployment insurance, and food stamps. Obamacare built upon Medicare and Medicaid.
The most influential forms of libertarianism aim to radically curtail all of these in order to lower taxes, particularly taxes on the most prosperous Americans. “I don’t want to abolish government,” Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, told National Public Radio in a 2001 interview. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”5 The organization’s pledge to oppose all tax increases was signed in 2012 by 95 percent of Republican members of Congress and all but one of the Republican presidential candidates.6 Were its ideal realized, there would be a lot of Gene Cranicks: people who discover that they can no longer rely on the government to protect them. The party did not always endorse that ideal. This development is the result of an intellectual movement.
Within Obion County, there is disagreement about how the tax burden should be apportioned: farmers don’t want their taxes raised to protect homes from fire.7 It is a problem that obviously could be addressed by imposing an annual seventy-five-dollar tax on residences but not farms. Everyone I spoke with in Obion County agreed, however, that raising taxes is politically impossible. Two years after Cranick’s fire, South Fulton enacted a new law allowing the fire department to respond to all calls within a five-mile radius of the city. But homeowners who had not paid the fee would be charged $3,500 per call.8 There is a persistent squeamishness about the tough discipline that was administered to Cranick.
The individual firefighters were troubled. “Most everybody has been compassionate and neighborly,” Cranick told a reporter. “I understood some of the firefighters went home and were sick. Some of them even cried over it.” His wife, Paulette, said, “You can’t blame them if they have to do what the boss says to do. I’ve had firemen call and apologize.”9
But perhaps those firefighters just didn’t understand that doing what’s right can be hard. Beck and Goldberg argued that letting the house burn would make America into a better, more self-reliant society.
Beck described Cranick as though he were deliberately “sponging.” Kevin Williamson, in National Review Online, wrote: “The world is full of jerks, freeloaders, and ingrates—and the problems they create for themselves are their own.”10 Cranick, who was sixty-seven years old, had paid for fire protection for years, however. “I’m no freeloader, I’ve worked all my life for everything I’ve got.”11 He remembered paying up every other year except one. “But humans forget. It seems like I do more than I used to. I just don’t think they done right.”12 The implications of Beck’s views are harsher than he realizes. Suppose there were children in the house. If the firefighters rescued them, wouldn’t that also create perverse incentives, encouraging other parents to sponge?
Leftists sneer at Glenn Beck. But he is a smart man who is good at his job. Journalism is an intensely competitive business, and he has been a remarkable success. His ideas matter. They have a huge constituency. He knows how to mirror and shape the moral convictions of much of contemporary America.
Copyright © 2022 by Andrew Koppelman
