The LA Fires: The ‘Social Contract’ Is Nonsense, and No One Is Coming to Save You
Possibly one of the most inane phrases ever uttered about modern governments is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s oft-quoted phrase stating that “taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
This reflected the naïve view, often pushed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, of the so-called “social contract.” According to this idea, we pay taxes, and in return the state provides order, protection, and all the blessings of civilization.
Presumably included among all those taxpayer-funded civilizational “services” provided by governments one can find “fire suppression.” But, you wouldn’t know it from watching tens of thousands of residents flee their homes in southern California and Los Angeles County as fires rage. As of Wednesday at midday, five different fires in southern California are still zero-percent contained. Nor is this some hard-to-reach rural area with few roads and little infrastructure. These fires are right in the middle of suburban cities and towns. Yet, it is all apparently too much for lavishly-funded government agencies to handle.
Indeed, government authorities in Los Angeles County and California had neglected infrastructure to the point that it became useless in many areas in terms of battling the blazes. In the early hours of the Palisades fire, firefighters found themselves hamstrung by a lack of water from fire hydrants. In spite of years of warning about the growing threat of fires in the region, California bureaucrats couldn’t be bothered with upgrading the water system to ensure reliable water supply and pressure in case of a major fire.
Since 2022, California firefighters have been bragging that they’ve been sending fire suppression equipement to Ukraine. This wasn’t paid for by firefighters, of course. It was funded by the taxpayers.
Meanwhile, the mayor of the City of Los Angeles—who is paid more than $300,
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
