free forum make a forum for free message boards free forum hosting free phpbb forum phpbb create free forum

dylanh · Joined: 03 Jan 2011 Posts: 48

Here's my quote:

"To Williams, selling water for profit made no more sense than 'farming out the pure air of heaven, of placing it in the hands of a few men among us to be stintedly doled outat a price.' " (page 193)

Few quick things about it-
I picked this because it seemed to summarize the argument for water as a common. Why chose this resource to market and profit off of instead of others? It's basically the same, and just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.

Olivia Becker said-

Knaideface · Joined: 03 Jan 2011 Posts: 39

Like what people are saying, if water is to be a common then some sort of regulation needs to be put in place. Obviously, it costs money to purify and transport water, and that money needs to come from somehwere. Whether it comes from taxes or needs to be bought on its own I believe is what seperates commons from comodity.

Here is my quote

arose2011 · Joined: 03 Jan 2011 Posts: 17

I agree with Gigi that the “grey area” of water ownership has to be eliminated, one-way or the other. I’d much rather have water either completely privatized or completely publicly owned. I also definitely agree with what Olivia (buntaine)’s point about not knowing you have something until it’s gone. It’s weird how no one ever really voiced the thought “gee, you’d think with all these gases we’re putting into the atmosphere, it’d be potentially catastrophic.” But why acknowledge something like that if it means turning away so much cash? The shorter the supply of pure water gets, the more water companies with advocate for water to be privately owned. It leads to a really disheartening conclusion about America: the answer to all your questions is money. Even when it comes down to a basic human necessity like water, we can’t (as a whole) decide that millions of lives hang in the balance with something like water privatization, and that for the good of everyone, not just for a few, we should make it publicly owned? I guess not. Also, in reference to Rachel’s point about the doctors, priests, architects, etc. romanticizing water, I think they romanticized it for a) marketing (like you mentioned) and b) because its impossible to overstate water’s importance. I feel like there are an awful lot of people who aren’t truly aware of how dire a situation this whole water shortage thing is. If the only way to wake these ignorant people up is to tell them that water embodies god, so be it.

wfreedberg · Joined: 03 Jan 2011 Posts: 24

I can see very little if any good coming out of the commoditization of water. The question that bugged me was whether or not the government can do a better job of keeping water a common resource than private companies. Really, the problem of privatizing or centralizing water comes down to who we trust to run our water (lolz).

From the Dylan/Buntaine dialogue above-
I LIKE that people have the option of getting on a plane and sitting in a huge seat and having lobster and champagne (money and personal prickishness allowing). There’s got to be a baseline for resources that everybody should have, though, before anybody gets to walk across the class curtain. When you get right down to it, even the most basic resources are somewhere on the sliding scale of common or God-given to commodity and luxury- in a dystopian society, we could practically charge you for the air we breathe. I just wish there was some mutually agreed-upon set of resources that every human should have access to.

Looking over the forum, I think it’s fair to say that we as a class think that access to clean water is a basic human right and that water should be available as a common resource. Rawson certainly gives examples of stirring arguments for public water. The water companies he cites have far less poetic platforms and are clear “bad guys”. But I wonder if there weren’t other motives for people to oppose municipal water, that is, aside from greed and ignorance (that animalcules argument was absolutely hilarious).

My quote was, “companies drew water from Jamaica Pond in neighboring Roxbury and transported it through pipes to better-off neighborhoods in the southern part of the city” (187). It seemed like a pretty stark illustration of the impracticality that can come of capitalism (or classism, depending on how you look at it).

mjoyce · Joined: 03 Jan 2011 Posts: 19

My quote was:

"Temperance advocates in Boston, for example, hoping that a municipal supply of water would diminish alcohol consumption, transformed water into a metaphor for moral purity, a carrier of nature's medicinal benefits, and a symbol of their cause."

I totally agree with Rachel's questions/statements relating to this. Why was water, a substance that is vital to human survival, transformed into this "metaphor"? What was with all of the new things attributed to it?

Personally, I think this redefining of water was partly to gain the support of the upper class. Obviously, the upper class (for the most part) did not have much sympathy for the lower classes, so my take on this "metaphor" is that it helped sway the upper classes' ideas about water/water rights. It's easier to say that cleanliness is a commodity than it is to say that morality and divinity are commodities.

This metaphor goes along with the idea on page 189, that dirty water was the root of alcoholism, and that "alcohol was antithetical to God and nature, water was a 'drink divine' and nature's nectar'". While water is obviously not the cause of alcoholism, they had to attribute it to something. I'm curious about if having clean water available to everyone influenced the consumption of alcohol in Boston.

IsaacRynowecer · Joined: 03 Jan 2011 Posts: 17

From what I understand about life, more people are usually working class than rich. So how does it make sense to deprive the majority of the people in a population of usable water so a very small group can profit? None of the reasons that were given for why water should be commoditized made any rational sense. Although I do agree with all the people who said that if water is to be made a common it needs to have regulations. If people just decided to use as much water as they wanted unendingly, then there would be as much of a shortage as if it were commoditized. One of the ways that regulations could be put into place is with taxes etc, but nobody likes being taxed. The problem is that while it should be, there are as many potential problems with water being free as there are with water being commoditized.

I found it very hard to relate to the debate the scientists in the reading were having over whether or not water cleanliness affected people’s health. Over so much human history I feel like it would occur frequently enough where people would realize that dirty water makes them sick. I also feel like there was a sense of toughness from the citizens that drank the dirty water. As if yes it was dirty but they were fine with it, maybe it proved something. I am not quite sure of the relevance/importance of that thought.

My quote was “The Waltham Company, for example, allowed unlimited access to its water, and some wealthy residents left their wells unlocked when leaving the city for the summer. Although other well owners guarded their water supplies more closely, an entire neighborhood might patronize a single well and pay nothing for its use.”

I felt like this quote shows how water was in a gray area between commodity and common. While for certain people it was bought as a commodity, it was then used by people who had not purchased it as a common.

Willblum · Joined: 03 Jan 2011 Posts: 21

I chose the same quote as Dylan:
"To Williams, selling water for profit made no more sense than 'farming out the pure air of heaven, of placing it in the hands of a few men among us to be stintedly doled outat a price.' "

It indicates this sort of nebulous confusion I always have around the privatization of water. What does it actually refer to? I mean I understand how a company or person could own a well and own the rights to the water in the well, or how you could buy a lake as a land purchase and own the water in the lake, but how does it apply to rivers? Could one, in a privatized water system, buy land on either side of a section of a river and legally be able to divert water from that section? Could they build a dam there? I really have no idea. And what would a modern privatization of water look like? Would a private company come in and buy the municipal waterworks from the state or the town or whatever and then require a subscription? or would they literally own the physical water that the municipal system uses?

Assuming that the private company would take over our current waterworks system and then charge a fee for its use, I can think of a few possible answers to Will's question. Firstly, if one operates under the assumption that the private sector tends to be more efficient than the public sector, the argument that the people would ultimately be better served by privatization isnt necessarily malicious/greedy. Also, privatization might encourage responsible water usage on a personal level because if you pay for water not in a portion of your tax money but on a per-use basis, you have an incentive to reduce usage, which ultimately cycles back and reduces prices for everyone, as demand is lower and supply higher.

Obviously neither of those two justifications address the idea that water is a right which everyone ought to be provided with, but i suppose if you think it's ultimately best for everyone if they have to find their own water etc etc etc.

I don't think all free market capitalists are greedy bastards. I think some people genuinely think that the free market ultimately lifts civilizations and their citizens up more than governments can.

Free Forum