Re:Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here
by noobermin on Saturday July 30, 2016 @03:13PM
(#12194265)
I think the point here is as in Israel, there needs to be a system, government, and culture that makes a free market possible. In the case where such a system is corrupt or instead offloads the costs onto another group of people, such a system falls apart and you have revolution as a result.
Re:Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here
by pm90 on Saturday July 30, 2016 @04:30PM
(#12194571)
Exactly. While the parent comments correctly claim that many Middle-Eastern countries are technically capitalist, they do not provide a fair system where anyone with the capital can set up shop and start offering products/services. There is a large amount of bureaucratic red tape and often lack of property protections that scare away genuine capital.
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.