Quote:
Originally Posted by aussenseiter
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Public water is a market intervention. A necessary and proper intervention, of course.
But private could deliver it much cheaper.
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true... but you can't allow something that is more or less required for survival to be controlled by such a few people.
like back in the 1800s some bigwig titans built nationwide railroad and telegraph/phone lines.
then, they turned to the US Gov't and said, "We own all of the railroads and phone lines, so now you're going to do what we say, because you can't do anything about it"
Zuckerberg and Bezos can only dream of the influence held by the rail and telecom barons.
since then the gov't has been cagey about allowing any small group to control vast resources. It's a matter of national security.
like when you shop around for an electricity supplier, you aren't shopping which product you are going to buy, you're shopping who you're going to give your money to, but this manner of privatization hasn't really changed anything, except for opening investment markets to the utilities which at the end of the day, is a good thing as it naturally stabilizes prices and opens more avenues for the gov't to shave off pieces of the money stream, which is necessary to maintain the infrastructure.
the power company in cali and hawaii for example meet their investor's demands on customer payments, gov't subsidies and other minor sources, and that's just to get by - to survive, then they don't have jack to update their infrastructure then power lines get damaged and start wildfires
the real tragedy here is that people act surprised that national resource infrastructure is in such a state of disrepair, frankly it's a miracle that it all hasn't fallen apart already.
buy seeds and mason jars, you're all gonna need to learn to can foods within your lifetime.