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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Odd quote from this article:

"One interesting idea that has emerged in dry places (notably Australia and Israel) is water markets. These make sense on a pretty basic level: if something is scarce and valuable, I should be able to buy, sell, and speculate on it."

Given that water is a fundamental necessity, it's supply should not be subject to rigged markets and monopolistic pricing, which is the norm when private investors try to take over natural monopolies (i.e. there's no 'competition' in water supply systems, rather like electricity markets.)

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Water isn't a fundamental necessity (as in required for life) for 70-80% of the water used.

Water markets aren't typically (maybe there are some?) aimed at individuals, they're aimed at commercial users (farms, power plants, data centers, factories).

For example, see the : https://youtu.be/druiwE_GjRI?t=559 and the last section where they talk about waste.

Pricing encourages factories to do things like recycle water on site.

Yes, but pricing lubricates the slope towards the setup where Nestlé owns 100% of the water because they bid a pittance and the nearby town can't afford to outbid the pittance. Markets are a two-edged sword. One edge is "rich people can pay for factories to recycle water on site" but the other edge is "rich people matter, poor people don't." There's nothing wrong with trying to use edge #1 -- that's what capitalism is all about -- but edge #2 exists, is sharp, and has cut plenty of fingers off. People are leery of it for a reason.

How would you handle that 20% - 30% that is essential for life, if the rest is purely market-based?

>Given that water is a fundamental necessity, it's supply should not be subject to rigged markets and monopolistic pricing

How do you feel about land? Zoning restrictions, property taxes, etc?

I tend to think in terms of competitive markets vs. natural monopolies when it comes to private vs. public ownership and management.

So, for property, well, is all the property owned by one entity? If there's one bank that owns all the farmland, that's not a competitive market for farmland.

Water is like electricity is like fiber optic routes, however, and those should be public utilities - but the equipment they need to build and maintain those systems should be provided by the private sector, in a competitive bidding manner.

>So, for property, well, is all the property owned by one entity?

In the case of a municipality, and in thinking of landownership as a "bundle of rights" such as water rights, air rights, mineral rights, development rights, leasing rights, etc... So many of those rights are controlled by the local municipal authority.

Water bottles are much cheaper than batteries.

For example, suppose that after a natural disaster some people are left without water and without power. It makes perfect sense to load some water bottles into a truck and drive over there to help them, but it would be very impractical to load a truck with enough batteries to make even a tiny bit of difference.

literature on water system remunicipilization suggests little difference between private and municipal ownership of water systems, at least as recently as when I looked a year ago

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