Taxation and other forms of sacrifice

The most minimal form of government is a night watchman state: a government that provides law and order, and lets markets take care of the rest.

But are people willing to pay the taxes and make the sacrifices required to support even this most rudimentary level of public services?

Yesterday on the London Underground I saw an advertisement calling for volunteer police officers or "special constables" as they are known here in the UK. 

For the police force, volunteers are a way of saving money. 

What's in it for the volunteers? A warm glow from the pleasure of giving to others? Or the warm glow of exercising power over others? 

Or does volunteering now pay off in the future?

According to the BBC, in September 2010 the Metropolitan Police decided to draw any future recruits mostly from the the pool of volunteer special constables.  Would-be recruits now have to work 18 months as unpaid volunteers before applying to the force.  

The requirement for 18 months "volunteer" work might, at first, seem like a straightforward reduction in police officers' wages - starting salary zero, rising to £23,000  after 18 months of part-time work. It's like I argued in my recent post on minimum wages: when the salary floor is set above the market wage rate, other aspects of the job will be adjusted, bringing the effective compensation downwards. 

Yet expansion of the special constabulary - the volunteer officers - means that there is less need to recruit paid officers.

The Metropolitan Police business plan for 2011-14 is full of phrases like this:

"Over the next four years the Met will have to reduce the amount it spends by 20 percent. These challenging cuts will require a systematic review of the way policing is delivered in London."

 "We are increasing deployment capability by expanding the Metropolitan Special Constabulary."

The hard numbers are on p. 27 of the business plan.

Planned increase in number of special constables between 2011 and 2014: 1,667.

Planned number of police recruits: 0.

Even in a night watchman state, someone has to make some kind of sacrifice to pay for the night watchman.

Taxation is a way of sharing the burden of that sacrifice across old and young, men and women. 

But no one wants to pay taxes any more.

So we lure young people into providing night watchman services for free, with false promises of jobs in the future.

Comments

[Patrick]

Presumably, no pay will reduce the quality of candidate. I imagine the likely outcomes are: fewer candidates, more dead and injured police, more dead and injured citizens. It's probably ultimately self-correcting, but wow, what a mess. Catbert must be running the London Metropolitan Police HR debt.

No wonder Calgary (and Edmonton) have had such success poaching police:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/25/canada

A friend was recently nailed for rolling a stop by a very polite former Bobby.

[Geoff NoNick]

Okay, except that the UK isn't a "night watchman state": it's a highly complex social democracy. In fact, all of the money that should be paying for the night watchmen is currently being expended on what proponents of the night watchman model would consider to be frills: subsidized public transport, free health care, nearly-free postsecondary education, etc, etc. No one is willing to absorb cuts at the frill end, so the actual essential services of government are cut instead.

I'm not saying I buy into the night watchmen model, but using a volunteer police programme in the UK as evidence that the night watchmen state model can't work is pretty disingenuous (and the insinuation that the volunteers "get off" on being bullies is nothing short of insulting).

[Frances Woolley]

Patrick - yup, and add to all of this the cost of living in London. It just makes me angry, though, the vague promises of "valuable experience" and "training" when the Met *knows* that they're not planning to hire anyone in the next three years.

[Phil Koop]

"Presumably, no pay will reduce the quality of candidate."

Or at any rate, the quality of the work done. I was surprised that nobody raised the dual of the "total compensation theory" expressed in your previous post, which is exemplified by Dilbert's Total Work Equation:

Total Work = Real Work + Appearance of Work

The point being that real work is conserved; as employers demand more total work, it is the appearance of that work rises. Joining you and Dilbert gives us something like "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

[btg]

Here in Toronto, Mayor Ford and his supporters went through an exercise on services

it tried to get members of the public to go online and vote on which things were core services and which things government should outsource or stop doing. However, 60% of the 13000 responents said that they would willingly pay higher taxes to maintain current service levels http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1023213--hume-cuts-loom-as-budget-season-kicks-off - but then the right wingers then dismissed this as being not-scientific.

so, there isn't really a great deal of support for the "watchman state" of cops, courts, defense and property rights, as in the end the main benefiticiary is though who have amassed property but expect everyone else to pay to ensure that it doesn't get stolen or destroyed while providing little or no benefits to those withouth property.... generally the watchman state is what youi get in a banana republic, but even then, the privelged few still end up living in gated compounds and paying for extra security!

no, the unapid special constables is part of a different trends, where wage costs are reduced by exploiting job seekers - you get this in many industries, including radio and TV - every morning show on radio in Toronto sems to have unpaidf interns.

There is a real problem with public sector wages and benefits growing at a faster rate over time than private sector wages, and that this is unsustainable - it used to be that "public servants" had modest wages and benefits, but had job security as well as getting recognition in non-finan cial ways - see jane Jacobs "systems of survival" - but now it is both - cops get higher wages than they should plus they stick together and are not accoutnable (G20 proves this) and they get massive public support when something happens (death or injury) in a profession that is actually not that dangerous compared to, say, forestry.

End unpaid internships, but also, weneed to change the way that public sector unions operate, as unions are a monopoly, and government is a monopoly with powers that private sector monoploies lack - maybe instead of current arbitration, wage settlements need to be compared ONLY to what equivalent non-unionised private sector workers earn, with adjustments down for job security, and upward for being unionised.

[Joe Heath]

The "volunteer" line suggests that this is the "big society" idea in action. The bit about recruits being drawn from the volunteer pool, however, suggests a different term, which is "intern." If we think of them as interns, then this is just a case of the public sector adopting a model that was successfully pioneered in the private sector. "We lure young people into providing... services for free, with false promises of jobs in the future" -- this is exactly what people complain about with internships. (Interns built the pyramids, as they say.)

On a vaguely related note: I was in Taipei recently and noticed that they have volunteers working in the subway, directing people about and generally being helpful. I suspect it's because the system is (relatively) new, and such a huge improvement, that the city is able to channel some of that enthusiasm into volunteerism.

Final observation: this police internship program is possible, I assume, in part because the vast majority of British police officers remain unarmed.

[Jane]

This is an open invitation to police corruption; what are these volunteers supposed to live on, their families money? Their honour and pride in being a police officer? Bah, humbug.

[Leo]

Mandatory volunteering/unpaid internship requirements are very disturbing to me. They seem to intentionally create an externality in unpaid costs. This externality has to be borne by either the intern's parents (so the rich have a leg up), the intern taking on debt (thus creating a dependency on the eventual paid job until the debt is paid off), or the intern taking on a second, worse job in order to support the unpaid internship.

[Andrew F]

There is a limitation to how far this can be stretched. Unless a large percentage of these special constables are eventually recruited into paid work, one would expect the willingness of candidates to partake in unpaid work to fall off.

[Alastair]

Under UK law, a Police Office cannot be made redundant. It is a job for life, modulo gross misconduct, or a change to the law (which might not even be possible to apply retrospectively against current employees).

So, why would you want anything but an massively high barrier to entry for new Officers? Given what we know about Met Officers (c.f. Ian Tomlinson, Jean Charles de Menezes, News International, etc etc), I would only conclude the barrier is not high enough yet.

[Wonks Anonymous]

Even more extreme than the minimal "night watchman" state is the remedial state:
http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2007/12/03/minimal-state-vs-remedial-state
On a related note, Robin Hanson has suggested a system in which most law is provided by an anarcho-capitalist system, but there is still a government which enforces anti-trust on the providers of law.

[Wonks Anonymous]

I didn't link to it in my previous comment since Hanson's website seems to be down at the moment, but the url is here:
http://hanson.gmu.edu/regprivlaw.html

[Patrick]

Alistair: "Under UK law ..."

Really?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5793087.ece

[Determinant]

Frances wrote:

Patrick - yup, and add to all of this the cost of living in London. It just makes me angry, though, the vague promises of "valuable experience" and "training" when the Met *knows* that they're not planning to hire anyone in the next three years.

It's the tip of the iceberg. The modern employment market is dysfunctional in several ways. The first is a popular corporate philosophy of "eating the industry". Ever wonder why so many job ads want the moon in terms of experience? They don't want rookies. They don't want to pay for training. They want to hire away from the competition.

A good example of this is the life insurance industry. Few life insurance companies and agencies do basic training anymore; Sun Life and Freedom 55 are the only ones I know. The rest hire experience. Manulife admitted a few years ago it didn't train new agents as a rule and hired away from the competition. The rise of Managing General Agencies in the life insurance industry is entirely geared to providing experienced agents for hire on a casual basis.

More broadly, why are we surprised when enterprise acts in a venal manner? I've seen in all the time in business. Business is not some paragon of rationality, nor are business or managers different from anyone else with the exception of perhaps being more like a pirate than most.

More importantly, and this is a generation gap, why do we expect employers to provide a sort of mini welfare state in terms of pensions and health benefits? Most private employers have backed away from that. Pensions have degenerated further than health benefits but the latter is still in a downward spiral.

Business and society seems to not want to actually pay for anything. Not taxes, not for training, not much really. We really seem to be nickel-and-diming ourselves to death.

[Josh]

I'd just mention that Toronto has a volunteer police auxiliary as well, albeit on a much smaller scale:
http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/communitymobilization/auxiliary.php

[Alastair]

Patrick - really really, yes. Soldiers and Police Officers are Servants of the Crown, somehow technically different from being an employee under UK law; they cannot be made redundant, and do not have a legal right to strike.

See e.g. "Police 'may force officers to retire to cut costs'", which is probably what the Times article refers to, or the fact that lots of back office staff (who are not Police Officers) are getting fired, or simply not filling posts when people do retire due to "natural wastage".

[hosertohoosier]

If you look at the work of recent Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, she finds plenty of examples where public goods are provided (or negative externalities reduced) largely through voluntary means. For instance, lobster fishermen in Maine voluntarily limit their catches, in order to prevent overharvesting. More anecdotally, I think Freakonomnics has something about a company that distributes donuts to workplaces, and relies on the honour system to collect money successfully.

In collective action experiments, simply allowing people to talk increases outcomes for the group markedly. I recently tested this principle in a buffet, when I chided two people for cutting in line (queues are the cornerstone of civilization, dammit). When they came back for seconds they patiently waited in line.

I think a lot of this is contingent on social capital. When people have many deep ties to other people in their community, they are more likely to contribute to the social good. Ironically, a night watchman state could only work if it wasn't run by the sort of Ayn Rand worshippers that would support one in the first place.

This also poses a problem for a large faceless city like London, or for a national government. You don't just think of "your kind of people" benefiting from services any more. Moreover, the tools of voluntary cooperation - for instance, shaming - are less likely to work with large disconnected groups (although if the Vancouver riots are a portent of the future, that may be changing).

[Frances Woolley]

Geoff Nonick: "In fact, all of the money that should be paying for the night watchmen is currently being expended on what proponents of the night watchman model would consider to be frills: subsidized public transport, free health care, nearly-free postsecondary education, etc, etc."

Yes and no. Public transport is free for over 65s, but far from cheap for everyone else. Post-secondary education was nearly free once upon a time, but at 9,000 pounds is now, for the degrees that are cheap to deliver, probably priced at more than the marginal cost of provision.

We need a new word, e.g. a geriatocracy, for a state where the goods provided are those that benefit seniors, and young people are asked to work for free.

btg: "There is a real problem with public sector wages and benefits growing at a faster rate over time than private sector wages, and that this is unsustainable"

Just a clarification: public sector wages *for lower skill employees* are generally higher than those in the public sector. Seniors executives in the public sector are generally paid less than in the private sector. It's a much more compressed wage distribution. But, yes, I think we'll see big pressure on public sector wages in Canada coming up.

hosertohosier - yes, thinking about Elinor Ostrom is helpful.

Jane: "This is an open invitation to police corruption" - no, that's just a user fee ;-)

[Tim Worstall]

Umm,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Constabulary

We've had specials for longer than we've had a properly paid and organised police force.

And specifically about the Met: the requirement is to do two 8 hour shifts per month. This is not the same thing as an internship at all.

The other thing is that as a special with the Met you get an all London travel pass. About £280 worth and valid for travel on all trains (underground and over) and buses. As the website itself says:

"Special constables also receive free travel on the London Underground, London Buses, Tramlink, Transport for London (TfL) operated Overground services and the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) is extended to all MSC officers both on and off duty."

So it's not actually that bad a deal.

And the other thing is, as Bobbie Peel himself said, there's a very good reason indeed to have volunteers: "His most memorable principle was, "the police are the public, and the public are the police."".

[Frances Woolley]

Tim - "we've had specials for longer..."

This gets back to the Elinor Ostrom point raised earlier. Yes, people policing others does establish a form of social order: "Did you see the sign that says to pick up after your dog?" "There's a rule against parking in front of fire hydrants - if you don't move your car, I'll call the bylaw enforcement officer." And even absent interfering busybodies, people don't violate the rules if they know what goes around comes around.

Ostrom goes through all of the conditions that make this voluntary participation/community stuff work. A key part of it all is that reputation matters, people have repeated social interactions.

London is a mind-bogglingly big city - Ostrom's conditions, for the most part, don't hold.

Sure, a travel card is a good benefit, and brings the wage from zero to £280/(12*16) or more than a pound an hour.

"the requirement is to do two 8 hour shifts per month. This is not the same thing as an internship at all." In a low wage world, 16 hours of volunteer work v. 16 hours of paid work is the difference between not having the rent money and having the rent money.

And the points that you raise don't address the points about intergenerational equity, misleading advertising (*tell* people that there's a 3 year hiring freeze and all they can expect to get out of it is a travel card), and the potential for corruption.

[Shlaw]

Just another unpaid internship. How is it that the trades, typically thought of as a low status occupation, actually offer apprenticeships where the apprentice learns the trade and is paid, while the equivalent for information workers is frequently unpaid and offers little in the way of learning. I'm shocked that our society considers unpaid work to be acceptable.

[Patrick]

"a geriatocracy, for a state where the goods provided are those that benefit seniors, and young people are asked to work for free."

Geriatocracy. Nice.

Some days I think I'm living monetary and demographic disequilibrium dystopia (the sum of all Nick's fears?) where there are lots of old folks and no babies, everyone is stuffing huge amounts of cash and Gov't bonds under their mattresses, and anyone under 65 is forced to work for peanuts at high tax rates (to pay for heart transplants for octogenarians).

But ... I just stopped for some Timmie's bilge water and the very nice ladies who served me (one on the till, one to pour the used motor oil) could have been my Gran (well, almost - she *is* 91). A glimpse into my own future?

I'll have to start practicing... "Would you like fries with that?"

Sigh.

[Andrew F]

It might be cultural, too. Unpaid internships are rare in Canada, and very common in the US. Not sure if the difference could be explained by differences in legislation.

[hosertohoosier]

"London is a mind-bogglingly big city - Ostrom's conditions, for the most part, don't hold."

Actually it just makes a different point of hers (some of her first work involved the Indianapolis police department): polycentricity matters. "Law and order" is not one public good. You may have a gun registry, which is best run by the feds. You may have a crime-lab for an entire region. On the other hand, perhaps there are advantages to organizing police departments or police auxiliaries at lower levels. For instance, when people concentrate on a given area they make connections and gain local knowledge (Blair's effective work in the Regent's Park area of Toronto is a great example of this).

Lets think about the benefits of an individual becoming a police auxiliary?
-People like getting kudos for prosocial behavior (which is more likely to happen if the people that see them walking their beat are their neighbours), or status/respect/uniform-related sex appeal
-People may want to make sure their specific neighbourhood is safer (which is more likely to happen if they patrol their own neighbouhood, both because of an added presence there, and because they may be able to take advantage of local knowledge - "those damn teenagers are always smoking drugs in the park")

So I guess I wonder whether the problem isn't in the general idea of whether or not people will provide public goods freely, but rather to which locality they are willing to do so. A program organized at the city level, stressing the benefits of future employment may be less effective than one organized locally, stressing service to the community.

[Tim Worstall]

"Sure, a travel card is a good benefit, and brings the wage from zero to £280/(12*16) or more than a pound an hour."

Umm, it's a £280 *per month* value. £17.50 an hour is pretty good money for London. Well over median wage.

[Determinant]

It might be cultural, too. Unpaid internships are rare in Canada, and very common in the US. Not sure if the difference could be explained by differences in legislation.

In my experience, this is the case. I called around the south end of my town in 2004 looking for a summer job. I landed (no pun intended) at a company that made avionics. They paid me student rates but before I started work I signed a complete employment contract for my four months. It detailed my pay and working conditions and when I was supposed to leave.

From the company's perspective, it made my status regular and invoked the full protection of employment law for the company. I was put in a proper, regular legal employment relationship. If something went wrong then they themselves were protected in the eyes of the courts.

Fair's fair for everyone involved.

[Gepap]

Taxes might be a "wat of sharing the burden" now, but it began as the means for those in political power to obtain the surplus they needed to feed themselves, their families, and retainers. How else were the God-Kings supposed to feed themselves and the temple priests? By doing their own farming? And they are enforced with the thing that has always been the base of power, violence. That "night-watchman State" is not viable unless those watchmen can actually stand up to the big scary outside horde, which is why no actual "night-watchman" state has ever existed or will exist.

can you economist at some point please start reading up on some history, PLEASE? Just so you can realize how utterly divorced from reality so many of your ideas are?

[Frances Woolley]

Tim - "£280 *per month* value." You wouldn't recognize that value unless you used transit for stuff other than work and/or had a multi-zone commute. What's a zone 1/2A or 1/2A/2B card worth?

hosertohosier: "So I guess I wonder whether the problem isn't in the general idea of whether or not people will provide public goods freely, but rather to which locality they are willing to do so."

So lots of people willing to police the crowds for the outdoor concerts at Hampton Heath, not so many wanting to work the night shift in Tower Hamlets? And when the volunteer force is expanded and the paid force is stagnant/contracting, how do the resources get allocated?

And of course once you start expanding volunteerism/reducing the number of paid workers, there are all of these complicated tensions between the two groups.

Think, e.g., about volunteers in a library. Now I'm betting that there's lots of people who'd like to volunteer in a library, and lots of volunteers who are probably perfectly capable of doing a lot of what librarians do. So which jobs get assigned to volunteers, and which to paid workers? And if the volunteers get assigned nothing but the boring, low-skill bookshelving jobs, will they really be happy to keep on volunteering?

[Patrick]

I see your point, but just to nit pick: librarians (people with an MLIS degree) don't (typically) re-shelve books. Lower-wage clerical staff or volunteers do that.

[Frances Woolley]

Patrick, you're right, librarians don't shelve books, and that's a good point.

No, librarians help people find information, decide what books need to be ordered for the catalogue, manage information - which are fun tasks that I'd like to do if I was volunteering at a library.

[Greg]

Maybe we're looking at a symptom of an increasingly two tiered society: The haves who won't pay taxes, and the have-nots who can't. Look at the US, where 47% pay no income tax. Some increasingly can't, others increasingly won't. Even the top 1% only pay (on average)about 18% of taxable income. And when the next budget deal goes down..?

[Jacques René Giguère]

Geoff NoNick
"that they get off on power is ..insulting"
In Ulster, B Specials were notorious for their brutality. They were used when the regulars didn't want to dirty themselves
There are special constables in NYC. They are unarmed as they are untrained and notorious for "behaving like heroes", that is taking unnecessary risks that a well-trained pro would avoid, endangering everyone around and a lot of them bullying as much as they can.
The power trip is severe enough with the pro that , last year, the director of Québec National Police Schoool publicly asked for better psychological tests to weed out what he estimated were at least 20% of the rookies who were unfit for duty precisely for the power trip reason. Anyone who has seen cops on the beat slowly massaging their guns and truncheons won't need much Freudian insight...
No one under 30 should be serving as police officer. Just let the bad hormoones calm themselvees.

[Sina Motamedi]

The idea of volunteer police officers scares the hell out of me.

[Patrick]

I agree with Jacques. The young cops need to be tested and they need to partnered with senior officers.

A coworkers whose dad was a long serving RCMP officers once told me an interesting story. His dad was partnered with the new recruit who'd been assigned to the detachment. It was a rural detachment in Nova Scotia. One night they get a call about an intoxicated fellow causing a disturbance at the local dive bar. When they arrive, they find a standard drunken brawl and the instigator seems to be a REALLY BIG guy. What does the new cop do? He gets out of the car, pulls on his black leather gloves, whips out his baton, and starts to march off to do battle! The senior officer sees this and tells the young idiot that he's going to get himself killed, so put his baton away, take off his gloves, and wait in the car. 5 minutes later the crowd is dispersed, the drunken giant is sitting quietly handcuffed in the back seat, and their on their way to drop him at the drunk tank without anyone getting hurt.

[Determinant]

There is a real problem with public sector wages and benefits growing at a faster rate over time than private sector wages, and that this is unsustainable - it used to be that "public servants" had modest wages and benefits, but had job security as well as getting recognition in non-finan cial ways - see jane Jacobs "systems of survival" - but now it is both - cops get higher wages than they should plus they stick together and are not accoutnable (G20 proves this) and they get massive public support when something happens (death or injury) in a profession that is actually not that dangerous compared to, say, forestry.

End unpaid internships, but also, weneed to change the way that public sector unions operate, as unions are a monopoly, and government is a monopoly with powers that private sector monoploies lack - maybe instead of current arbitration, wage settlements need to be compared ONLY to what equivalent non-unionised private sector workers earn, with adjustments down for job security, and upward for being unionised.

I'll take the bait. Public sector job security is a canard. I can cite several example from the Government of Ontario and the Public Service of Canada where large layoffs were conducted. Both governments can and have laid off public servants. Tony Clement, the President of the Treasury Board (Minister of the Public Service) recently commented that there was no promise of a job for life in government hiring and never was.

An "Implied guarantee" is worthless; it can be refuted by the government of the day. Further while we can discuss rates of pay and benefits, in general it is the private sector that has reduced wages (primarily in the withdrawal of pensions and benefits) and reduced job security in the form of contract work.

Lastly the for the Government of Canada the Public Service Staff Relations Act lays out flat that the Government does not bargain any contractual term that includes money, all pay and benefits are provided under policy or statute but not union contracts. The reason is that the money comes from Parliament and Parliament has a constitutional right to spend money as it sees fit. The Crown cannot bind Parliament financially like that, that would be the tail wagging the dog.

[Tim Worstall]

"What's a zone 1/2A or 1/2A/2B card worth? "

£106.

£6.62 an hour. Still above minimum wage.

[beowulf]

Not sure how long Canada has had auxiliary constables (at least since the 60s) In the US, county sheriffs have always had the power to deputize any adult into his posse when, as the Brits would say, he raises the hue and cry. An auxiliary police or "reserve deputy" program simply bureaucratizes the process (with minimum training and service obligations to remain in good standing).

Related to this, the US has more volunteer firefighters than it has paid firefighters, something that bugs firefighter unions to no end. The Census Bureau could delineate town and country by tracking where the local fire chiefs has managed to fire (so to speak) the volunteers in order to run all-paid departments.

There are some jobs that people enjoy doing so much, they'll do it for free. There are many little boys (and not a few little girls ) who want to grow up to be a police officer or a firefighter. A reserve deputy or volunteer firefighter system allows adults to do this on a part-time basis under the supervision of full-time professionals (just as every Army has career NCOs supervising privates).

So long as there are citizens willing and able to perform a public service at no expense to the taxpayers ((taking care, of course, to weed out felons and other unbalanced souls), then the better question is... why do governments waste so many tax dollars hiring employees to perform a task that citizens will volunteer to do for free?

[Jacques René Giguère]

Beowulf:
Volunter ff do not bug unions because they are unpaid. Places who emply volunteer do so because they are small, have few resources and don't have much fires anyway. But they can't pay for up-to-date equipment, training (if at all) waste away, no experience is gained and guys get killled at an horrible rate ( on an hourly basis small-town volunteer ff may have the worst casualty rate of any occupation).

There are indeed lots of jobs like firefighters or fighter pilots little boys wish they could for free.
Bad joke alert: Playboy editor to new pro photogaphy graduate after a successful interview:" Travel first class, all expenses paid with the Playmates. Full health benefits, pension plan. Oh and it's $200K per year.What do you think?" Interviewee :"With all my students debt,for the first year can I pay only 50k?"
My current fantasy is heart transplant surgeon. Next time you feel an infarctus coming, I am ready...

[Frances Woolley]

beowulf: "Related to this, the US has more volunteer firefighters than it has paid firefighters, something that bugs firefighter unions to no end."

Which reminds me of the special tax credit for volunteer fire fighters in the recent federal budget - another sign that there's going to be a movement towards more voluntary provision in Canada over the next few years.

And the firefighter tax credit is another case when voluntary provision is paid in some way - in this case, with a tax break, not free travel.

Jacques Rene - must be the jet lag, I found that really funny.

[Determinant]

Sorry Frances, I don't read it that way. Sure, we have had volunteer firefighters forever. In one town I lived in the volunteer fire department was stocked with every able male, it was the "thing to do". The place where I worked actually asked that their people not respond to fires until called twice in order to curb absenteeism.

That tax credit was pure retail politics.

But as the Globe and Mail pointed out yesterday, firefighting isn't actually needed so much anymore. Better building codes have reduced the incidence of fires. Most (80%) calls to fire departments are for rescue or para-ambulance service, not actual fire fighting.

It's the same with police pay and budgets and the falling crime rate. Fire and Police are popular so we can't seem to resist the temptation to pay for services we don't actually need.