I like their old stuff better.

Early fire fighters were employed by insurance companies. They would notice or be informed of a fire at, or threatening the property of one of their clients, and they'd hurry over and extinguish it.

If they arrived to find the building wasn't owned by a client, and the fire wasn't threatening to spread to one, they would rescue anyone stuck in the building, but took no action to fight the fire.

Source

I remember as a child being amazed at how unfair that was.

They were there, they had water, they had the skills, yet they just let some guy's factory burn to the ground because it didn't have that little logo on the wall.
I was so glad that we have a fairer system now, where the firemen help everyone.

I'm not a child any more, and I've come to realise that I had things backwards.

Imagine a politician makes the following suggestion:
"To make everything fairer for everyone, the value of all of the property in the entire country will be added together.
Then we'll get an insurance quote for the entire lot, divide the premium by the number of people in the country, and each pay our share.
It'll be much fairer than what we have now."

It would be immediately apparent to most people that this policy would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
That the billionaire with 20 factories and 10 houses would love to have his insurance bill paid by the masses, while the college student with nothing but an ipad and a skateboard would be paying to insure 100 times more property than she owns.
Nobody would see this as anything but a cynical attempt by the wealthy to externalise their costs onto the poor by way of the political process.

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The fire department is a kind of insurance.

It minimises the losses incurred by unanticipated destructive events.
So why is the college student paying income tax on her part-time earnings, paying for firemen to look after trillions of dollars of property she'll never own? Why can a billionaire buy another mansion without needing to factor in the cost of fire protection?

Surely the champions of the little guy, who want the wealthy to 'pay their share' would be better served by pushing for the complete re-privatisation of the fire department.
Those with an abundance of assets, currently experts at avoiding paying taxes, would be faced with an expensive fire department subscription, just like they're currently faced with a large insurance bill.
Those with few assets, the ones who are really struggling, might only save a few dollars a month, but those few dollars might make all the difference.

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The sick irony of all this is that some of those factories are currently empty and running at a loss as a tax deduction.
Less taxation and more privatisation would give the wealthy more incentive to make best use of their property, since empty, unattended buildings would cost a lot in fire department subscriptions, and couldn't be used to offset taxes which aren't being levied.

This is also true of the police force.
So many people are concerned that privatisation would have the wealthy hiring large, private security forces to bully the little guy.
I agree that they'd hire large private security forces, but they'd have to, to get the same level of protection they currently get for free, at the expense of the little guy, who is right now being bullied into paying taxes.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
1 Corinthians 13:11

Have a fantastic day.