All the Same

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's home turned out to be in the path of the Woolsey fire in southern California, and it was saved, at least in part, by a private firefighting crew hired by their insurance company. Presumably because sending people out to make sure that the house didn't burn to the ground was less expensive than paying to have it rebuilt and replacing a bunch of the stuff that's in it.

But, there has been a fair amount of controversy about this. The Atlantic takes some time to speak to the hullabaloo, while also laying out a brief history of firefighting in America. The story concludes as follows:

“Are the present examples (Kanye West et al.) the thin end of a wedge that will lead to the wealthy buying better services in all these realms: education, policing, healthcare, firefighting?” [University of Kansas historian Victor] Bailey wondered. “Or are we already a long way down this path?”

Well, to answer Mr. Bailey's question, we're already a long way down the path. After all, the wealthy can pay for private schools for their children, private security for their property and persons, pay the prices that physicians charge for whatever procedures they wish and a host of other things. And they already can have access to better firefighting, through the simple expedient of moving to a location where a number of other wealthy people live and paying the requisite taxes. In fact, they can do that for everything on Mr. Bailey's list. What Zip code one lives in goes a long way towards determining the baseline quality of public education, police departments, local medical services and the fire departments. We know this already, right?

The aspect brought up by the Woolsey fire is that merely being in proximity to wealth doesn't allow one to avail themselves of the supposedly superior private services that the wealthy can buy for themselves. Being able to get into the right Zip code may grant access to the "better" public schools that the 1% can send their children to. But if they hire private tutors for their children, their less well-off neighbors are still shut out. But that logic falters somewhat in this case. While firefighting is a publicly-funded service in many places, this is less often the case for homeowners insurance, except in the case of certain lines, like flood insurance, that private insurers are less interested in taking on. And it's hard to make the case that the homes of the wealthy should be allowed to burn simply to keep them on a par with their neighbors, when it's understood that this will result in a claim that will need to be paid - the money that the insurance company saved by protecting the home, rather than rebuilding it, can go to other people. This is not to say that preventing the destruction of the home is a benefit to others. But the extra money spent is deadweight loss, and that does no-one any good.

At some point, we're going to have to answer the question of what is money for. If, through a myriad of individual choices, people decide to make some fraction of the populace wealthy, what are they allowed to do with that wealth? If the only permissible expenditures are useless frivolities, is that genuinely going to address the perceived disparities? I'm not sure that it will, but perhaps we'll find out.