Firefighters watch as home burns to the ground

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Just about everything operates on that premise though. You hardly ever use your auto insurance, but you pay a fee every month for essentially no service. Same thing with homeowners insurance - rarely used but paid nonetheless.

Or to use some non-insurance related services: I have a security system on my house, and I pay them a monthly fee. While the alarm has gone off once or twice when I've burnt dinner (it has a fire alarm as well as burglar alarm), I've never needed to use the service to request fire or police assistance. (They automatically call you up, but you just tell them that you burnt dinner, give them your PIN number, they turn off the alarm, and it's back to business as usual.) Or if you have cable or satellite TV, you pay for all the channels, even though there are certainly some channels you never watch.

So paying for a service you do not intend to use - or in the case at hand, hope you never have to use - is not unusual at all.

The whole idea of everyone paying a little bit for a government service works on the same premise. Asking $75 for people outside the normal service area isn't like protection money - it's not like they set your house on fire if you don't pay like the mafia would. It's a lot like well... fire insurance for lack of a better word. What dollar amount do people living within the city limits pay via taxes to the fire department? If it's around $75 per household, I see no problem with it.

NOTE: It is entirely plausible that the residents of the town are paying more taxes than those living outside the town - many areas have local taxes at a level lower than county taxes - usually called town or city taxes. If those taxes fund things like the fire department - and it makes sense that they would seeing as how their service area is within the city - then it's really only asking those living outside the city to pay their fair share.

While I agree in general, I find it hard to believe that the second scenario you desribe (as posted above) could be true. While it is possible that they just pulled the $75 number out of their backsides, I do not think it is reasonable to assume that it only costs $75 when the fire department comes out to your house to put out a fire.

If the money paid by the town residents were adequate to cover the cost of them fighting fires outside the town, then the town government probably would say that the fire department is over-funded. It is more likely that the fire department is funded to a level to cover the costs of fighting fires within the town. So to expand the service area, they need additional funding.

And I agree with that too. That the local government is pretty much entirely Republican suggests that the vast majority of residents support that party.

 

That isn't how it works in practice at all. The fee for the service is $75 because most people, most of the time don't have a house fire. Requiring people who receive the service to pay full price is not going to cause people to stop subscribing.

Whether you have insurance or not has no effect on your liability in an accident and you don't file insurance claims with the police. How was I supposed to take that?

Actually it does. The hospital is funded by the people who go there and receive care. Most of those customers would be unable to receive that level of care without insurance. Were a hospital to lose all of its insured customers, it would close or begin to provide only a level of care that its customers can pay for.

One person, one time, and the fire department has helped people who hadn't paid in advance before without the sky falling. The money collected from the city is already enough to compensate the personnel with service outside the city as an afterthought, so the fees collected from outside the city are just there to reimburse them for their extra expenses. If the city passes that expense onto a paying customer, there is no reason they shouldn't help.