exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Yes, I say it works because global oil distribution emphatically does work. It is palpable nonsense to claim otherwise. All over the globe, people can get transport and heating fuel, petrochemical goods, lubricants etc, at affordable prices and of mostly acceptable quality, thanks to mostly appropriate regulation. It has led directly to a massive leap forward in the standards of living for billions of people over the last century, all thanks to Henry Ford, the Wright brothers and people like Marcus Samuel.Water is a commons. If you allocate its use by free market, for profit agency, it will in most cases be irrecoverably damaged and diminished as a resource.
What lesson would that be? That all the well-run watershed and aquifer management agencies set up by communities on the planet that have ever done a good job of managing that common resource should be sold to Exxon?
Prediction: The capitalist insurgency in the old USSR will not cause the abandonment of the irrigation diversions that starved the Aral Sea, and restore good management to that watershed. There's too much money in cotton and irrigated produce.
Says the guy advocating for something of which there has never been a long-term working example, and theory says can't work anyway.
The way the Great Lakes have been managed so far beats anything we've ever seen from private water management - that's a low bar, but still. California's setups have been corrupted by corporate interests of course, but otherwise they seem to "work" ok as well. There are quite a few working river and lake management setups on this planet - select your favorite, and build from there, would be my advice.
Tell you what, though: I'd support the commodification and market allocation of all fresh water that is actually produced, manufactured or extracted, via capitalist investment. Desalinated, in other words, using privately funded and built desalination plants.