But they were nonetheless capitalist. There were market forces at work to fix the problem, but it failed . Which still is a powerful argument against your thesis.
Sometimes the hand of the market isn't sufficiently incentivized by starving broke people. Sure they would pay, but can they?
Those countries though lack attributes of classical capitalistic societies like
- proper ownership titles and their protection from third parties, including the state
- low barriers for market entry
- free(r) flow of capital, including across their borders
All of these were practically absent in those countries. Good luck establishing your broadcasting service being a christian/jew/<minority> and without connections to the feudal rulers/police/military.
Which capitalist society does employ it's military to produce basic goods, like milk?
I feel like I'm being mistaken for a staunch libertarian here, so I want to point out that I'm not that at all. I do think there is a big role for government investment to play in society, including in providing drinkable freshwater. This was the Israeli solution, and it's increasingly going that way in California as well. I'm not advocating for strict market-force-only supply-and-demand, but rather just pointing out that wasteful uses of water will go down as the price of water goes up, which it should be allowed to do rather than being subsidized in order to control wasteful uses. The cost of having enough water to drink and to cook with is measured in the low cents per day per person in the US. A single penny gets you over two gallons from the faucet where I live. And I'm in favor of safety net programs to prevent people from dying from illness, hunger, or thirst.
"But when he put them on sale, three inspectors from the council asked him for bribes. Mohamed refused to pay."
As for letting your lawn die, what I really meant but didn't say because it doesn't sound as pithy is to replace your lawn with landscaping or native flora that require much less water to maintain. There are many parts of California, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and other places that are all essentially desert, and rapidly tend back towards desert in the absence of voluminous irrigation. It makes no sense to waste thousands of liters of water per lawn per day keeping non-native grasses alive in the middle of a desert. For the cost of only several months' water you can replace your yard with something that doesn't need watering and won't blow away in a storm, the simplest and cheapest replacement being gravel.