I'm subscribed to a Substack from a young guy (Maxim Benjamin Smith) who's skipping college and is doing a whole set of prescribed other options. The Substack is called The Great Man Podcast: A Radical Alternative to College (https://www.greatman.com/). So instead of going to college, he's doing things like getting EMT certified, learning a foreign language, etc.
Here's this week's article: https://www.greatman.com/p/what-i-did-this-week-week-58. He's been doing a stint as an EMT on wilderness fires, currently in Oregon, USA. And the gist of the article is - the whole wilderness firefighting thing seems like a scam to him. Here's a quote:
I’ve got to say it
By tomorrow I will have been on wildland fires for 40 total days this summer. And, I’ve got to say, my perspective of it all has completely changed.
Like clockwork, we see videos of engines with their lights and sirens on driving through raging fires somewhere on the west coast each summer. The public sees that and assumes that there are in fact major crises (sometimes there are) and that everyone working on the fire is putting maximal effort in to contain it.
Well, I’ve only got 40 days on wildfires, but I’ve seen a different side of things.
The first odd thing I noticed was how little fire we were seeing. The map we download show us where the fire is, yet while driving so much around us was green and unburned. As it turns out, the maps as well as the publicly available number of “acres burned” measure the perimeter of the fire, not the area.
The Falls fire, which I was on a month ago, was said to have been 130,000+ acres. Unless I need glasses, I can tell you that just isn’t the truth.
It’s deceiving.
So after that I was thinking, “That seems strange.” And, I began to pay more attention.
Hours upon hours of a shift would go by as people working all kinds of different jobs on the fire would sit around to talk. Hell, the new division supervisor on this fire is looking for people who have Starlinks today so that he can watch football during our shift.
I suppose the fire “threatening the community” isn’t urgent?
It goes on along these lines, and is a really interesting article to read.
I agree with him, that the firefighter "heroes", to whom we're supposed to say "thank you for your service" - have mostly lucked or finagled their way into a big payout for doing very little useful work. If firefighting weren't run by the government, we could probably get away with about a fifth of the firefighters (both wildfire and regular) that we have now.
It also reminds me of an incident from a while back. I was putting a diaper on my kid, turned away for a moment, and when I looked back, saw that he'd eaten some diaper cream. I was pretty sure that it wasn't a big deal, that diaper cream wouldn't be poisonous or anything, but I called poison control anyway. They told me that as long as it wasn't some foreign brand of diaper cream, that it was fine, I shouldn't worry. End of story, I thought.
Ten minutes later, there's a knock on the door. And what do I see but 3 firefighters, in FULL equipment? No kidding. Freaking out, I opened the door, wondering what the heck was going on. I didn't even link it to my previous call to poison control.
And it turns out that they came because I had called poison control. Even though it was a completely benign situation, 3 firefighters came out.
I figured then that they came out because they have SO LITTLE TO DO. And they needed to juice their statistics with fake calls, just so they could claim they're doing something.
Also, if you're trying to set up an event for little kids, just call a fire department and they'll give you a tour of the facilities, allow the kids in the fire trucks, let them try out helmets, etc. They're ALWAYS available.
What are your thoughts? I turned this into a bounty because I know I read an article (or maybe watched a video) many years ago, about how most firefighters don't really do much of anything, we have way too many of them, and about 99% of their calls are false alarms, something along those lines.
So here's the actual bounty: find me some articles (or videos or something) about how we need far fewer firefighters than we actually have, that much of "firefighting" is a make-work scam. I did some initial research, but wasn't able to find anything other than the story about scammers calling people on the phone, pretending to be firefighters, requesting donations. But now I can't find any articles like this anymore. It's probably an unpopular topic.
And also, if you find articles like this, please tell me where and how you searched.
2,500 sats paid
fire departmenton mises.org