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Friday, June 7, 2013

Privatization Is Not The Way To Go

Our daily lives are filled with obligations to various companies.  You most likely have a cell phone bill, power bill, cable bill, car payment, gas payment, rent/mortgage, among others.  

For the most part, these bills are for services that we deem as a luxury, not a necessity, but more importantly, we rely on someone to provide this service for us; usually a private company, but not always.  

It makes sense for private companies to be selling you cell phone service, doesn't it?  Doesn't it make sense for a private company to be piping 160 channels of television programming into your house? Makes sense to me because I do not want the government to be involved in every part of commerce, rather just focusing on providing public service.  The problem arises when those public services get farmed out to private companies whose goal is not to provide the best possible service to the most people, rather it is to make the most profits with the least amount of investment.  

There have been cities such as Detroit and Atlanta who have attempted contracts with private water firms to control the city's water supply, and those have ended badly.  While this is not a common practice in the United States, it is however an immense problem in several parts of the world in developing nations who do not have the capital to maintain aging municipal systems.  

Privatization of water does not always have to be about the flow of H2O from your faucet at home, the bottled water industry has been leeching off the environment for decades with little to no accountability.  

Watch below for some background on the bottled water industry.   



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