Comment by greenavocado

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.