Ayn Rand Conservatism at Work -- Firefighters Let Family's House Burn Down Because Owner Didn't Pay $75 Fee

Yep, society don't need no social safety net. And by the way this is the type of conservatism that Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty believe in. Kids dying of abscessed teeth within shouting distance of the White House. Kids starving all over America. Tent cities. Hobos. Health care? What that? And the goofballs voting these jerks into office are the same ones who will bear the brunt of Ann Rand conservatism. They'll call it freedom. Peacenik calls it stupidity.


Talk of limited government is appealing until you see what it actually means in practice: a society in which it's every man for himself.



Thanks to 30 years of right-wing demagoguery about the evils of “collectivism” and the perfidy of “big government” -- and a bruising recession that’s devastated state and local budgets -- we’re getting a peek at a dystopian nightmare that may be in our not-too-distant future. It’s a picture of a society in which “rugged individualism” run amok means every man for himself.

Call it Ayn Rand’s stark, anti-governmental dream come true, a vision that last week turned into a nightmare for Gene Cranick, a rurual homeowner in Obion County, Tennessee. Cranick hadn’t forked over $75 for the subscription fire protection service offered to the county’s rural residents, so when firefighters came out to the scene, they just stood there, with their equipment on the trucks, while Cranick’s house burned to the ground. According to the local NBC TV affiliate, Cranick “said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.”

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