The Grenfell Tower Fire and Political Libertarianism – Patheos (blog)

I would have been fourteen or fifteen. I was at summer camp, and cabin inspections generated intense competition. And no wonderthe cabin with the lowest cabin inspection score each dayhad to clean the bathrooms at 11 p.m., while everyone else was in bed. One morningone of the boys cabins disabled their cabins fire detector, taking out the battery and labeling it an OSHA violation. Oh boy did they get cabin inspection points for that.As the week went on, rigging an OSHA violation before cabin inspections became a matter of course.

Perhaps I should explain. This was no ordinary summer camp. It was a camp that combined fundamentalist Christianity with libertarian political views. At the campfire each night wesang songs that made fun of the United Nation. In our daily sessions we learned that social security was an unsustainable Ponzi scheme, thatenvironmental protection regulations were a plot by the UN to turn the world into a dictatorship ultimately led by the Antichrist, and that farmers whoencounterendangered species on their land should shoot, shovel, and shut up to avoid losing use of their land.

But today, my mind is drawn to the disabled fire detectorand the praise the boys in that cabin received for their innovation in rigging up an OSHA violation. And my mind is drawn to something elsethe dozens of lives lost inGrenfell Tower, lives that might have been saved had the building had functioning alarm and sprinkler systems.

With Grenfell Tower, weve seen what ripping up red tape really looks like, George Monboit wrote on Thursday in an opinion piece in The Guardian. Grenfell Tower will forever stand as a rebuke to the right, Jonathan Freedland declared in the same publication a day later.It seems that in 2014, the U.K. minister of housing declined to require sprinklersbecause the Tory Government had committed to reduce regulations.We believe that it is the responsibility of the fire industry, rather than the Government, to market fire sprinkler systems effectively and to encourage their wider installation, he said.

I grew up in the U.S., not the U.K., but this rhetoric isachingly familiar.

One would think that the Grenfell Tower fire, with its colossal loss of life,would make clear the necessity of basic safety requirements like sprinklers. Not so.On Friday, U.S. libertarian journalist Megan McArdle wrote an opinion piece in Bloomberg. Perhaps safety rules could have saved some residents, she wrote.But at what cost to others lives? Theres always a trade-off. Hereis the core of McArdles argument:

If it costs more to build buildings, then rents will rise. People will be forced to live in smaller spaces, perhaps farther away. Some of them, in fact, may be forced to commute by automobile, and then die in a car accident. We dont see those costs in the same way as we see a fires victims; we will never know the name of the guy who was killed in a car accident because he had to live far from work because rents rose because regulators required sprinkler systems.

When it comes to many regulations, it is best to leave such calculations of benefit and cost to the market, rather than the government. People can make their own assessments of the risks, and the price theyre willing to pay to allay them, rather than substituting the judgment of some politician or bureaucrat who will not receive the benefit or pay the cost.

Its possible that by allowing large residential buildings to operate without sprinkler systems, the British government has prevented untold thousands of people from being driven into homelessness by higher housing costs. Hold these possibilities in mind before condemning those who chose to spend government resources on other priorities. Regulatory decisions are never without costs, and sometimes their benefits are invisible.

McArdle still believes that sprinkler systems should be optional. But in her insistence that people can make their own assessments of the risk shes ignoring something elsethat the residents at Grenfell Tower wanted a sprinkler system. They organized and made demandsdemands that, if met, would have saved lives in last weeks fire. They were ignored. This isnt a case where people happily chose to live in a dangerous building because its rents were lower.

Im going to hazard a guess that no one wants to live in a firetrap, no matter how low the rents are. We as a society benefit from ensuring a certain minimum standard for our housing. Certainly, we can talk about overregulation. Where I live, I am required by city codeto obtain a permit to build so much as a porch. But requiring sprinklers in high-rises is not overregulation, and McArdles solution to homelessness appears to be dangerous slums.

Interestingly,experts have notedthatif the Grenfell Tower had been built four years earlier, it would likely have collapsed during the blaze, costing only more lives. After a gas explosion caused a high rise to collapse, new building requirements were put in place to ensure that a structure would not collapse in case of fire or a blast. Built several years later, the Grenfell Tower was constructed in accordance with thenewregulations, and thus did not collapse.

There are societal benefits to having minimum housing standards. Chicago learned this in 1871, when a single fire spread quickly due to substandard (or nonexistent)fire safety standards, destroying over three square miles of the city and taking 300 lives. A fire in one building can spread to another, meaning thatfire safety standards affect whole communities, not individual buildings alone. The same is true of indoor plumbing and disease, which like fire can easily spread.

Making safety standards optional leads to a system where low rent buildings are firetrapsone where only those with the ability to pay can avoid living in dangerous conditions. McArdle acknowledges this when she states that requiring builders to abide by minimum safety standards raises rents and makes people homeless. But while most respond to high rents with various rent reduction proposals, and to homelessness with shelters and transition to housing proposals, McArdle responds to both by suggesting that those who cannot afford to live elsewhere should be forced to live in firetraps.

McArdle frames the issue as one of personal choice. People can make their own assessments of the risks, and the price theyre willing to pay to allay them, she writes. This assumes that people have enough money to choose, which she admits (in her reference to homelessness) that they often do not. Thisadmission betrays her insistence on personal choice.

We can both ensure minimum safety standards in building housing and find ways to offset rising rents.We can both ensure that buildings have sprinkler systems and find ways to address homelessness. McArdle suggests that we handle homelessness and high rents by bringing back slums, but we live in a society that has the resources to upholdbasic safety standards while ensuring that affordable housing is available for those who need it. We have a social responsibility to do more than wash our hands of the issue and shrug when a high-rise fire claimsover sixdozen lives.

That camp I attended as a teen still takes place every summer, impartingthe samelibertarianmission and vision to new groups of children. It pains me to realize this, but it is unlikely that the Grenfell Tower fire will result in any change in whatstudents there are taught. For those who runthe camp, as for McArdle, it is government regulationand not fire, collapse, or diseasethat is the enemy.

Perhaps even now, as I write, campers are preparing for cabin inspection bydisabling their fire detectors and labeling OSHA violations.

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The Grenfell Tower Fire and Political Libertarianism - Patheos (blog)