Well. Make a snarky comment on a link you've posted on Facebook, and watch your email turn into a river of flame. In the 19th century, Philadelphia didn't have a fire department; it had lots of competing private fire departments. Ben Franklin had set up the system some decades before, and had encouraged the formation of competing firefighter brigades on the grounds that it would promote more vigilant and more widespread coverage of the city.



Fast forward to about 1840, and the system is now a gigantic freaking mess. Fire departments were now affiliated with fire insurance companies, and, increasingly, with political parties and political machines. They'd sabotage each other's equipment. Sometimes rival companies even exchanged musket fire. Two companies on the scene of a fire would literally stand there and argue over whose fire it was while the building burned down. If your house was on fire but you didn't have the mark on your door that indicated you were fully paid up with your insurance company(*), they would stand by and watch it burn. They'd pay kids to slap a barrel over a fire hydrant and sit on it, so as to deny use of the hydrant to another company.





The solution, to us here in the present, seems obvious: eliminate all the private fire departments--funded by insurance companies and politics and accountable to God knows who--and replace them with one fire department, funded by everybody and accountable to everybody.





That's the way we do it today. It is not free--you pay for it with taxes plus if they respond to a fire at your house, the city does bill you--but it's cheaper for everyone and more equitable. Like it or not, there are some cases where competition just does not make sense and a government monopoly does.





* Remember, "fire insurance" in this context is for the firefighters to show up. It doesn't cover rebuilding or replacing your stuff.

