Koppelman frames himself as a pro-market liberal. He's a nearly-extinct species of libertarian who is aware of the flaws of a market economy and the need of government intervention. It was a frustrating book to read, because it all comes off as standard progressivism. The only clue that Koppelman's philosophy is favorable to free markets is his own say-so. He offers few if any examples of favoring pro-market reforms. I heard him concede in a podcast, though not in the book, that the elimination of the Civil Aeronautics Board and deregulation of interstate trucking in the 70s were good. It would have been helpful for him to expound upon this in his book so we know where he positions himself on the spectrum of being "pro-market". His discussion of income inequality is just standard leftism. I was expecting a mature discussion of the reasons for income inequality, or perhaps a neutral, reasonable explanation of why inequality increased in recent decades. No such luck. He offers some statistics that demonstrate income inequality has increased in recent years, but with no argument whatsoever that the increase was unreasonable or that any identifiable group was being undervalued by the market. He spends a lot of time discussing John Rawls and and the Rawlsian "veil of ignorance". (See this piece highlighting some of Rawls's basic logical errors. Despite his popularity, his philosophy seems a bit confused.) Unfortunately, there's little connection between the Rawlsian philosophy and the modern income statistics. (Like, is any increase in inequality always bad? How do I know that the recent increase is too extreme? Or how can I determine what the right level of inequality is so I'll know when society has achieve justice? Koppelman doesn't really tell us.) That is the general theme of the book. He presents a theoretical argument for government regulation, but fails to justify government in actual practice. (He asserts that certain regulations are cost-benefit justified without really making his case, in my opinion. Show you're work if you want to be taken seriously by critics.) It might have been useful for him to contrast himself with standard progressives by giving some examples of markets being positive, examples which progressives would actually disagree with. Or he might have pointed to some period in history when inequality increased but did so for perfectly justified and understandable reasons. (Something like, "Such-and-such era also saw an increase in inequality, but in this case it was because some people chose to work longer hours while others adopted more leisure. Also, this was an age of genuinely beneficial innovations, and it was socially just to reward the innovators..." This would have been a nice contrast to the discussion in his book, which seems to have an implicit premise that any time inequality increases, it's unjustified.)
The book seethes with an element of Look at all these libertarian policies doing so much harm in the world! As a libertarian, it's pretty irksome to be catching blame for bad policy outcomes when we don't wield any power. Contra Koppelman, we haven't exactly been getting our way. Our critics grossly overstate our influence on policy. They somehow miss the fact that government has been growing in size and scope (contrary to the policy prescriptions of any prominent libertarian). It reminds me of the drug policy commentators who apparently think we've been living in a libertarian regime for the past several decades, and therefore recent trends in drug overdoses can be blamed on libertarian-influenced permissive drug policy. As someone who knows what the recent drug regime looks like and what the various libertarian policy prescriptions are, I can assure you we haven't recently lived through a libertarian drug policy utopia. This notion that we libertarians are getting our way with policy,and thus society's ills can be blamed on us, is pretty absurd.
The book's title is a reference to an incident in which a fire department allowed a house to burn down because the owner failed to pay a $75 annual fee. Koppelman's argument bizarrely tries to pin this on the rise of libertarian ideology. In his interview with Koppelman, Reason's Nick Gillespie politely eviscerates this narrative of the event. Gillespie points out that the fire department was not a private service, but instead was a neighboring city's department which contracts with nearby municipalities that don't have their own departments. This is hardly an example of private markets going wild. It sounds more like an extension of the DMV's model of "customer service" applied to government-run emergency services. Gillespie points out that in similar such instances, the private fire department typically puts out the fire and charges the homeowner some reasonable multiple of the original fee. (Some will be tempted to cry foul on this kind of surcharge. But if there weren't any surcharge for non-payment, then everyone would simply decline to pay until their house is on fire, so there would be no funding and thus no fire department.) Private businesses that provide emergency services are very concerned about public perception and bad PR, but a municipal agency pretty much has carte blanche to let someone's house burn down and say, "I don't really give a shit. Not my jurisdiction." I think Koppelman is basically 180 degrees wrong to pin this on libertarianism. This story is an example of the callous indifference of a government bureaucracy, and Gillespie has the right model of how private companies work in similar situations. In Koppelman's defense, he might not be claiming that the fire chief was a devoted Rothbardian/Randian/Reaganite libertarian, applying market fundamentalism to his profession. There was probably no causal connection between libertarian philosophy and the actual event, which would make Koppelman's fixation on it quite strange. He makes the connection more obliquely. Koppelman points to a few prominent libertarian-adjacent commentators (including Glen Beck) who argued in defense of the decision to not fight the fire. This is a little strange, to say the least. The titular event of the book was not caused by libertarian ideology, but because some vaguely libertarian-leaning commentators discussed it after the fact, he can blame us for it?
I'm a fairly well-read libertarian. I don't think of Glen Beck as being a particularly representative example of this clan. He almost never comes up in the libertarian blogs or books I read or the podcasts I listen to. He may self-describe as libertarian, but comes off as more conservative. Koppelman also lists Kevin Williamson and Jonah Goldberg as having commented on the event, both writing in National Review Online. It almost seems like Koppelman couldn't find any actual libertarians making the argument he wanted to tag us with, so he instead turned to conservative outlets. This is a little strange, as the book makes it seem like the libertarian blogosphere was buzzing with unanimous approval of the decision to let a house burn down. Here is Glen Beck's discussion; it's the transcript of a radio show, not a carefully penned article, so I'd cut him some slack for sloppiness in terms of language or logical structure. Here is Kevin Williamson's (incredibly short) piece. Also see Jonah Goldberg's two-paragraph commentary. Both Beck's radio clip and Williamson's short piece point out a crucial detail, that the South Fulton Fire department (the one that declined to put out a homeowner's fire in another municipality) until recently had declined to put out any fires outside the city limits. The $75 opt-in subscription to their services needs to be contrasted with the alternative of not having a the services of a fire department at all, not at any price. I think Koppelman and other people of his ideological stripe are morally obtuse in failing to comprehend (or declining to entertain) this important truth. He's apparently insisting on a "principle" that once you are capable of providing a service, you then become obligated to provide that service to anyone who needs it. It's worth noting (as Beck, Williamson, and Goldberg all do) that if you don't have some consequences failing to pay up, almost nobody will pay, and the fire department will be unfunded and thus serve no one.
See this roundup at The Atlantic of pieces that commented on the event at the time. Note that it includes a post by Ron Beasley, a leftist who says he agrees with Williamson. He makes an argument of the flavor: the $75 fee was like a tax to fund a government service, and if you don't pay your taxes you shouldn't get those services. A search on Reason's website turns up one single link, which doesn't express an opinion on the justice of the fire department's inaction. Here's an old post at Volok Conspiracy, to name another libertarian-inflected outlet (Volok Conspiracy has since moved to Reason). The Volok piece appears to be presenting this as an interesting question rather than a justification of the fire department's decision. It even says "one obvious solution is to make the service mandatory:
Require homeowners to pay the $75 as a mandatory tax". This is weird. It feels like Koppelman searched for the libertarian take on this question, couldn't find any sources that told his narrative, so he instead reached for any sources making the argument he was looking for. He ended up with a handful of conservatives and apparently zero libertarians, unless you want to reclassify Glen Beck and Jonah Goldberg.
If you want the authentic libertarian take on this, Gillespie nails it in the Reason interview. The fire department probably should have showed up to put out the fire, especially because some of the neighbors were paying subscribers, and their homes were threatened by the fire. (The fire department took measures to prevent the spread of the fire to those properties, though apparently not by putting it out at the source, which would have been the more humane and direct way of dealing with the problem.) They should have put out the fire and perhaps taken them to collection for some multiple of the $75 fee, or just acknowledged that the homeowner had previously been a dues-paying subscriber who simply forgot to pay one year (as appears to be the case).
The book has a lot not to like about it. I've only just scratched the surface in this short piece. Basically this post is aiming at the book's title and grand theme. To do a more thorough and targeted critique of the arguments in the book, I would like to re-read and dissect Koppelman's exact language with greater care. I was eager to read it after hearing Nick Gillespie describe it positively in a podcast. I have to say it was a let down. But it's a useful foil in that it's a book-length criticism of libertarianism that basically misses the mark.
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