Foster's Daily Democrat published my letter on November 25, 2005
About twenty years ago, when I expressed my concern to a county engineer that the landfill site he was promoting would almost certainly end up contaminating people's private wells and should either be lined or located somewhere else, he assured me that if that happened, they would simply hook the affected households to the central water distribution system. And, he went on to explain, that it "wouldn't be economic(al)" to prevent the pollution.
This clued me in to the fact that "not economic(al)" simply means that somebody's getting something (clean drinkable water in that case) that they don't have to pay for; which is a bad thing from the economists' perspective.
So, what we are seeing in proposals to sell off the ground water by the caseload is the realization of the economist's dream. The problem isn't that keeping all freshwater sources free from pollutants is expensive; it's that free goods are inherently bad.
Everybody's supposed to pay to survive. There is to be no free lunch, or water.
Posted by Hannah at November 26, 2005 04:47 PM