Letting It Burn

There is a big foofoora going on about a farmhouse in Tennessee where the subscription fire services let the house burn down.

I have no problem with this.

Here are the reasons:

1. First and foremost, no human lives were lost. There have been other cases of subscription fire services saving non-subscribers, but then letting the house burn down. In this case, every resident of the house was accounted for.
   
2. This was a rural area. This was not a case where letting this house burn down would threaten anyone else or anyone else's property. And, in fact, the fire department did take actions to keep the fire from spreading to subscribers' property.
   
3. The house-owner offered to pay the $75 fee once the fire department showed up. This is like offering to pay for the lottery ticket after your chosen numbers come up.
   
4. Some say that he should have been charged for the services after-the-fact (instead of the laughable fee offer). This argument has more merit, but we're talking about someone who couldn't be arsed to pay the annual $75 subscription cost. Were they supposed to negotiate terms as the fire burned?
   
5. Let's face it: the guy who lost his house was acting like an entitled bastard, and that always gets under my fingernails. "We didn't know they wouldn't put out the fire if we didn't pay!" There is so much presumption underlying that statement (for which I'll get a cite later) that it deserves to be punished for that alone.
   

Okay, my all-day in-work class is restarting. I'll try to flesh this out with references during the lunch-break.

[ETA] I've just barely had time to read the comments up to this point, and don't have time during this lunch-break to hunt down the cites (sorry), but I do want to say this:

A subscription model would not work in an urban area. The odds of some neighbor dying or someone else's domicile going down are too great. If a building should be condemned, then it should be destroyed in a controlled manner, not by a random fire.

And no, a subscription model for the police would not work exactly because the criminals themselves count as an uncontrolled externality.