Growing 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.
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