ceddeeoo Wrote:There are so many things wrong with this rant that I don't even know where to begin. No matter how much emotional value you have for water, it is a consumable good and whether it is owned by the government or corporations it will be sold, not given away. Please do not make sweeping generalizations about Africa, saying "over there there isn't really any developed country that has a stable government that can provide a stable source of water". That is disgustingly ignorant. I suggest you read an economic textbook and educate yourself on how markets work and the pros and cons of privatization. The only valid point you have brought up is that there are negative production externalities with these companies but the solution is not to give that market to the government. On the contrary, government ownership is a form of monopoly and contains many issues, the biggest being that with no competitors there is no incentive to improve your product or be more efficient.

edit: at the same time however I imagine you are either very young and/or foreign, but that does not justify your ideas regarding all this. Please do some factual research on the subject.

Matt Wrote:Most infrastructure like water, electricity, sewerage, gas and even telecommunications are considered a natural monopoly. At the end of the day there isn't much that the product can be changed to make it a better experience (except telecommunications), except for maybe reliability, but even then you have a regulator that sets targets it has to keep.

The capitalist way rarely works in these natural monopolies, as no sane company will roll out duplicate infrastructure to compete. It also comes down to how efficient it is to duplicate this infrastructure to the end user. Have a quick think about it. If there's two companies trying to compete, it now means that all the cost of that infrastructure is now shared over a lower percentage of people, thus making the costs higher on average. There's only so much you can sacrifice in infrastructure to keep cost's low without taking shortcuts or sacrificing reliability.

Not to mention being a business, shareholders demand a profit. The whole Government's not running efficient companies can be debated until you go purple in the face.

I honestly can't think of any natural monopoly that has been privatized that has worked well, or even kept prices down and let's face it they will never lower the prices, they have no reason to. In most cases they just run down the infrastructure, performing little or no maintenance of it.

Maybe if it was a not for profit organisation?

naive Wrote:I don't inherently agree that private business providing water services is a bad thing. I just reworded the paper without changing the core. The businesses aren't really selling the water itself, they are providing water transportation services. It's really a matter of being a service, not an end product. In America, the government does control water supplies to a certain extent but there is still private business competing with them.

For example, sure you could just use city water and sewage, but these government operated systems are still competing with the private sector. If the government does a poor job of providing water, private industry can step in and drill wells and provide septic tanks. It forces the government to stay competitive, and many businesses are able to compete against each other when it comes to wells, septic, etc.

As for third world countries, there are many positives to allowing business to come in and fill the void left by governments. As long as the businesses are not profiting off of restricting water, but rather by providing the service of water transportation to locations that could not previously acquire it, the private sector could be a great place of growth for the economy by allowing people to live in regions previously inhospitable. You could argue that a properly managed sewage system would be far more beneficial to local health and the environment than not having one and having shit everywhere (literally).