ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, PART 3,488. At The Atlantic, Megan McArdle argues that public funding and use of fire departments is justified because it protects Randian Supermen from the possibility of stray flames from some damn free-rider's house:

We force everyone to pay into fire departments because fires have very bad negative externalities: if your house catches on fire, unless you live on a rural farm, there's a good chance that your neighbor's house will burn down too...

I'm persistently disturbed by the notion that most of our fellow citizens are intellectual children who need to be forced to do what is good for them even at massive cost to their liberty, and ours.

Presumably residents of low-density states like Wyoming and Montana, where widely-spaced homes may burn without affecting others, would happily opt out of this public service racket. Here's an opportunity for McArdle and her fellow big-brains to exploit the natural-born libertarianism of frontier state citizens! Ask them why, if they value their liberty, they pay fire insurance for paupers when they could, at reasonable rates and with money saved from taxes, hire their own personal FDs. The ensuing, untamed conflagrations in Shantytown will provide welcome diversion on dark Big Sky nights, and if your own private firemen fail to perform when the time comes (and what are the odds on that, free citizen? You're too smart to have accidents!), you (or your survivors) can take them, or the corporation that owns them, to court for damages, the way nature intended.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: imagine this woman on a lifeboat.