Fire a wake-up call

The horrible senseless Oakland warehouse fire should be a wake-up call to us all. It should wake us up to how ludicrous that libertarian argument is that property owners will do the right thing in the absence of regulations like codes and ordinances being enforced. They won’t.

It should wake us that our mind’s image of first responders rushing into death trap buildings where they too will likely perish is absurd. They don’t.

It should wake us up that if an understaffed or under-motivated city government is either too lazy or too cheap to respond to years of neighborhood code enforcement complaints, it will actually save the city money. It won’t.

It should wake us up that every litigation lawyer’s favorite deep-pocketed defendant (the government) will wake up and pay much more in wrongful death settlements than they would have had the government actually up held the law in the first place. It should.

It should wake up incompetent, negligent government workers that their fat future taxpayer-funded public pension might someday be the source of some wrongful death judgments. It should.

Mike Reno

Post Falls