Life as a Privilege
At what point do we call it all off and start charging people a "life tax"?
No, really, since we're going to inject politics into it, the reality is that it won't be "liberals" or "leftists" trying to make living necessity a commodity. Remember, we're the ones trying to break that cycle.
To the other, if we set the politics aside, we might suggest that technologically and economically, it is easier to simply boost oxygen production.
For interplanetary travel, oxygen supply will be figured into the costs; for planetary colonization, it must be figured into nearly every developmental calculation.
Of course, the question is hardly new; there is an old anti-Jewish joke about the stereotypical size of a Jew's nose and the fact that "air is free". Or, as George Carlin once joked of the Vikings, if they can't steal it they'll fuck it, and if they can't fuck it they'll burn it.
And remember, "oxygen bars" in polluted cities already exist. Stop by and pay for a few breaths of fresh air that isn't going to contribute to your cancer risk.
Oxygen consumption won't be regulated per the topic post until a pretense of necessity, valid or otherwise, is established, and the marketplace figures out how to profit from it. Right now, it's kind of a novelty in polluted cities. And therein lies the key; O[sub]2[/sub] consumption control, as suggested in the topic post, would further stratify the human species, and in a capitalistic implementation qualify as social engineering much the way privatization of potable water has resulted in even more of the deprivation we were told it would alleviate.
And, yes, as long as some would inject politics into it, there are plenty of us who saw the disaster of water privatization coming.
There are two ways to look at the distributive processes of a commodity. One is scientific under the proposition that the goal is to distribute, say, water, as a living necessity. The other is to distribute that water as a business proposition in which profit margins mean more than life itself.