Yet again, the cycle repeats: mass evacuation, state mandates, bureaucratic “rescue” efforts, and a media chorus blaming everything on “climate change,” while never interrogating the role of government interference in land use, forestry, and property rights. The state’s alleged “fire authority”—Cal Fire—swallows taxpayer dollars and dictates “preparedness,” but can do little except order people around and perpetuate its own relevance. Meanwhile, individual choice, voluntary fire defense associations, and market-driven innovations in fire suppression are suffocated beneath layer upon layer of regulation, licensing, and liability law.

Let’s be perfectly clear: property rights, not state power, offer the only sane approach to fire prevention and survival. Hayek would remind us that central planners are woefully ignorant of local conditions. Bureaucrats cannot possibly possess the dispersed knowledge held by residents, entrepreneurs, and insurers. Yet, by monopolizing forests, roads, and emergency response, the state destroys incentives for private provision and prudent risk management. In a free society, private insurers would reward fire-resistant construction, well-maintained defensible land, and early warning systems through lower premiums. Voluntary associations would flourish, experimenting with new technologies and protocols tailored to actual conditions—not one-size-fits-all directives from Sacramento or DC.

Nozick demolishes the justification for coercive state intervention: people have a right to self-defense and to contract for their own protection. A minimal night-watchman state, if that, would suffice. The true outrage is how California’s regulatory regime strips homeowners and communities of autonomy. You can’t easily clear brush, you can’t build firebreaks where you want, you can’t market innovative fire solutions unless you first slog through a swamp of permits and red tape. State “safety” is nothing more than the suppression of free individuals' ability to respond to risk.

And as Rand would thunder, the moral right to one’s own life and property is paramount. Every fire season, we see the perverted logic of collectivism: your safety is a matter for the “public” to handle, not a responsibility you can voluntarily discharge or insure against. The state treats its citizens as wards, helpless without its benevolent hand, while it tramples the rights and ingenuity that make real survival and prosperity possible. The “common good” justifies forced evacuation, property seizure, and endless taxation to pay for bureaucracies that never deliver.

Let’s call a spade a spade: wildfires are not a crisis of nature—they are a crisis created and perpetuated by statism. Unshackle the free market, restore property rights, and watch as voluntary order, mutual aid, and the marvels of unhampered capitalism finally do what state planners never could—protect lives and property without violence, incompetence, and endless excuses.