Here’s something I had never given any thought to: The price of fire trucks. Plus, a worrisome fire truck shortage!

Huh? What would cause any town or city to run short of this essential piece of its community infrastructure? Answer: old-fashioned greed, coming from a modern-day monopolistic construct called “private equity.”

Essentially, this is a fast-money Wall Street scheme, encouraging very wealthy investors to buy up established businesses and either plunder their assets or consolidate several of them into a monopoly. It has targeted everything from healthcare to newspapers… and now, your local fire department.

Until recently, making and selling fire trucks was a competitive business, with family-owned manufacturers operating in every region of America. However (as detailed by BIG, a unique newsletter investigating monopolies) about a decade ago a private equity outfit began an industry “roll up,” consolidating independent truck companies into a national conglomerate named REV Group. It now controls nearly half of US fire truck sales.

What REV mainly revved up was its profits by doubling the sticker price for trucks to more than a million dollars each. Worse, REV increased delivery time for a local department’s order from about a year to as a long as four years, meaning old trucks break down and can’t respond to catastrophes. For example, the Los Angeles fire chief reports that in this month’s horrific wildfires, more than 100 of the city’s 183 fire trucks were out of service!

Fires are inevitable. Letting a handful of private equity speculators profit from fires is not. National and state antitrust laws already prohibit such greedheaded monopolization. So, here’s an idea: Enforce those laws! Learn more at the American Antitrust Institute: AntitrustInstitute.org.

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