Universal Freedom: The Only Hope for Fair Safety Services

"Socialized Safety Services" has been advocated for years by those who want Americans to place all responsibility for their safety services [i.e. Firefighters, Police Response, Rescue Teams, 911 service] in the hands of government.  They say safety services require us to put aside such considerations as personal choice and individual freedom as outmoded ideology that should be dispensed with.  First drop the context of individual rights, private property, and privacy - then the government is liberated to micro-manage every detail of the safety service that you are allowed to have.

The loss of freedom may be unfortunate in this view, but is necessary because most Americans cannot afford to pay for their own firefighters, personal body guards, rescue teams, or a private 911 service, or even a significant fraction of the cost.  Of course if that were true, the government could not afford safety services for everyone regardless of cost either.  However those who might be relieved to learn that they are not responsible for the cost of their own safety services would soon discover that they have become responsible for the cost of everyone else's.  There is a much higher price than that: a government that pays for all of our safety services would inevitably come to think and act as if it owns our bodies and homes.  That is a big bill to pay to avoid the difficulty of paying for our own safety services.  The talk about a "right" to safety services really means that no one should have the right to any safety services at all except through the government.

Many of us find paying for safety services challenging.  Many more have difficulty making it a priority in our spending - often because we think it should be someone else's responsibility.  Some who sincerely make the effort can't pay for everything they need.  Others, especially the young who think a fire will never strike their house or who think that they will never need to be rescued from a cougar attack, etc., choose not to make provision for safety services even if they could afford it.  That does not mean we should resort to the government to force others to provide it, or that everyone in the country should be herded into the gray and barren landscape of a compulsory government safety system.  The fact that some people are hungry does not mean that everyone should be forced to obtain their food from the government, and be taxed to pay for it.  The existence of the homeless should not mean that everyone be forced to find shelter only through the auspices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

We are told that because we all need safety services so badly, considerations such as individual freedom and especially the rights of safety professionals [i.e. police, 911 operators, firefighters, coast guard rescue workers, etc.] must be over-ridden, even if all of such safety professionals must be drafted into government service as if they were property--so their services can be micro-managed by the safety professional police.  But is is precisely because safety services are so important to each of us that we need to be especially careful to preserve and protect the rights of safety service providers.

One  rationalization of advocates for Socialized Safety Services is that private companies can have high administrative costs, and that government provided safety services like 911 are models of administrative efficiency.  This ignores the cost of the more than 100,000 911 employees who answer the phones, as well as the tremendous administrative burden to government safety service providers of trying to understand and comply with thousands of pages of regulations regarding safety personnel.  Yet those regulations have not been effective in preventing billions of dollars in fraudulently obtained safety services, such as when people dial 911 and there really isn't an emergency.  People wouldn't make such a call if they had to pay for it!  You can save a lot on overhead if you don't mind sending out safety personnel without any assurances that the caller is really in danger.  The administrative cost of burning money can be quite low.  It is not explained how the efficiency of government works for safety services and not the post office.  Markets work better than Socialism.  One wonders if any of the current Socialist Safety Service advocates have noticed the twentieth century as it was going by.

Universal Freedom is the only proper moral and political foundation for any policy.  "Socialized Safety Services" must be rejected as a government threat to our liberty.  American safety services must be based on American values. 

[The original article entitled "Universal Freedom: The Only Hope for Health Care" was written by Richard E. Ralston and can be read here.  It's equally retarded when it's about health care.]