An attempt
I think I am going to try to blog more often. It might help me collect my thoughts and I seem to come across interesting stuff and feel the need to share it. So here is my random observation today.
I was reading a blog called the Marginal Revolution (reading the news and blogs helps me orient myself for the day. I find I need a chance to collect my thoughts before I dive into work) and they had a post regarding a United Church of Canada imitative to oppose the privatization of water. The church’s feeling is that water should remain a public good and privatization will harm the poor etc. You can view the post here. The basic gist of the response is that some studies have shown an decrease in child poverty and an increase in water quality when a country ups its privatization of water companies.
Here we have a classic debate; on one side, a church frames the argument in its own terms. Privatization=Bad, Profit on human necessities=bad, public=good. Simplified terms like these betray the complexity of the world and the systems humans have to create to survive in it. The fact of the matter is no matter how important water is to human life, it must come out of the ground, be processed, cleaned, distributed and allocated. How we design the system that does that is almost as important as the water itself.
Funding the system is also important. Labor isn’t free, materials aren’t free, research isn’t free. Each hour a laborer devotes to a system is an hour he could be doing sometime else, say farming food for the community. A laborer also has to support her and her family, how do we best allow that to happen? In addition, how much water should each person get? Enough for subsistence? A 30 minute shower? To water a lawn? Wash a car? clean the house? play in the sprinkler? How much are these activities worth and what stops people from over consuming our resources? Rations?
Privatization can have significant benefits, but that does not absolve society from provided help to those who need it. Shotgun approaches to solving complex problems rarely work in the end. Instead, the focus should be on providing water to those who need it and letting the larger market allocate in the most efficient way. After all, we are all human beings.