Stop Fighting Private Firefighting

G rowing up in Pacific Palisades, I got to know great investors who managed to make it big and move into their dream homes. Now some tell me that the best investment they ever made was a $7,500 annual subscription to a private fire department. Most subscribers’ homes were saved. It’s not a terrible price when homeowners’ insurance, if it could even be had, costs several times as much and is paid out only after your house burns down. As Ryan Mills wrote in National Review last week, depending on where you are in the country and what your exact services are, private fire protection might cost as little as $450 a year.

While all of us hope for competent emergency services as the most basic government obligation of the social contract, the incentives involved never live up to a commercial contract. Government “services” exist whether they succeed or fail. Indeed, when they fail, they can get bigger without getting better. A private fire department that saves few of its clients’ homes will fail as a business and, ideally, inspire fresh competition. Unfortunately, with government firefighters overwhelmed elsewhere in this historic fire, thousands of my former neighbors learned that their homes had burned to the ground.

Some of the criticism of private fire services has been wild, suggesting that many would prefer to see every structure burn rather than have some saved because owners had the wherewithal and foresight to prepare for a known risk. The preference here should be easy: more homes saved. Private services undoubtedly saved homes that would have otherwise been lost — and crucially, not just their clients’ homes. Although obviously focused on their customers, by doing their jobs, private fire services reduce the risk to neighbors and sometimes even actively fight fires in structures whose owners paid nothing in order to save their targets. In one customer’s case, there’s not a fire hydrant on his steep private street to even attempt to draw public water from, and the private firefighters emptied his pool trying to save a neighbor’s house.

I should also note that, for years, the police department has committed relatively few resources to covering places like the Palisades, which, yes, has little general crime but also has suffered from a spate of home invasions by Chilean gangs looking for high-end handbags. That has prompted many residents to seek out their own private security as well — security that was eager to get back into neighborhoods to prevent looters during the recent fires but was prevented from doing so. Again, one would hope that paying some of the highest property taxes in the U.S. might ensure an attentive, full-service government, but it was tragically not to be.

Indeed, if a conservative wrote an Ayn Randian screenplay about the L.A. fires, it would be dismissed as unhinged: forest management being held up for years by environmental legal review; the state of California driving insurers out of the state by prohibiting them from charging market rates while spending a multiple of the fire prevention budget on services for illegal immigrants; the mayor of Los Angeles enjoying Ghanaian hospitality while leaving her DEI team in charge of basic services; the water chief intoning, “It’s important to me that everything we do, we do with an equity lens, and social justice, and making sure we right the wrongs from the past,” even describing it as her No. 1 goal, rather than, you know, providing water; and the female Los Angeles Fire Department assistant chief insisting, not in a gaffe but in a public relations video, that “you want to see someone who responds to your emergency . . . that looks like you” while lambasting critics who ask, “Is she strong enough to do this?” or “You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire.” Her response? “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”

Compare that attitude to a previous era. When the lefty oral historian Studs Turkel interviewed a white 32-year-old New York fireman in the 1970s for his book Working, the firefighter made liberal use of racial slurs regarding his changing neighborhood and the people he interacted with, acknowledging, “You just grow up into this prejudice.” But he also said “you get guys that talk about [epithets] and they’re the first guys into the fire to save ’em.” By modern terms, he was a racist who would be purged by any DEI program, but he was also totally committed to saving the life of anyone at risk, regardless of race.

I don’t care what the person looks like, but I want to make sure that there is someone capable showing up when families need it — and if you can’t be absolutely confident in the government providing that person, the private sector needs to be allowed to deliver.