Where Does the Expense Incur? Government Fires Rage

Denninger continues with some of his great work -

Note this one carefully folks...

Publicly hailed as heroes, Stacey Lee Schreiber, 39, and Irma Zamora, 40, raced to help a stricken motorist following a crash Wednesday evening, and were electrocuted by an estimated 4,800 volts of power that flowed from a snapped streetlight fixture into water from a sheared fire hydrant that had flooded a crash scene.
....
However, it was expected that the families of the two dead women and the five civilian would-be rescuers would soon receive legally mandated bills from the city for the emergency services they received, such as hospital transport and on-scene medical paramedic treatment, a fire department official told City News Service.
....
"We can't decide who's innocent, who gets a bill and who doesn't," Humphrey said Friday. "We have no control over this. We are mandated by the city council and the mayor to bill citizens for the services rendered by paramedics and that's what we do."

Oh really?
So let's see.  I have a line item on my property tax bill for "fire and paramedic" services.  I pay that tax every year.  So do you, if you own or rent property (if you rent it's included in the rent.)
The City already got the money for these services -- they are paid to have the people on staff, they're paid for the ambulance, they're paid for the fire station, etc.  You pay for it -- in your taxes.
Then you get charged again if you use what you already paid for and thus own.
And you put up with this.
If a private party attempted to do this it would be ruled a contract of adhesion (you never agreed to such transport or service) and thus void as there was never a meeting of the minds between the parties.
It is only through the jackboot of government that, without your consent, you can be billed for services that were voluntarily provided to you even though you never asked for them and even though you already bought them in advance.

This is roughly what I have been saying all along. Government has been bouncing from 'good idea' to 'good idea' for decades now and nothing is beneath them. Republicans and Democrats literally see their role as overreaching central planners of the Communist variety.

Sobriety checkpoints? Necessary.
Invasion of phone calls? Necessary.
GPS tracking? Necessary
Control of soft drinks? Necessary.

There is literally no end to the 'good' that the state thinks it can do. Even the half-hearted repeal efforts offered by the so-called free-market individuals, Republicans, are usually completed with the exact opposite effort.

This is in part because the monstrosity of government is being run like a corporation and has developed a life of its own. It must protect itself, not it's citizens, it must grow it's budget continually, it must offer more, bigger, better programs than before. All at the cost of its citizens. This is precisely why this style of government will work in the short run, (20 - 50 years) but will eventually collapse in on itself in the long run. It is inefficient, it is unaccountable and it quite literally doesn't know how to make a good decision because it removes the very mechanism by which it could make a good decision. The free exchange of goods and services in a competitive environment.

We see this playing out in healthcare, finance, the stock market, housing, etc..., yet the two parties are powerless to change it. Why? Because they literally believe more gasoline will literally douse the fires.