Am I the only one here that believes that running water is a luxury, not a right?
I've been in some pretty shitty situations myself, though none as tough as this. That much I freely admit. But the overall tone of the article seems to be one of horror that people might not have a ceramic toilet which flushes the waste away to a sewage treatment plant. Also, an attitude of "This is a first world country; this shouldn't be happening to anyone". (Yes, I noticed the sidebar on "corruption")
Does everybody else think that running water/sewage is a right?
"Right" is a word made for arguing about. Let's forget the word "right".
Clean water and sanitation are pretty much the two things which most enable us to maintain population-dense cities. Lack of modern sanitation repeatedly led to horrific pandemics in the Middle Ages in Europe, culminating in the Black Death. I don't have any statistics handy, but one would expect the presence of sanitation to be as big a contribution to personal health as diet, and what's more, poor sanitation is sure to harm other people through disease transmission.
So yes, I believe that clean water and sanitation are very important to human life at scale; important enough that we should pay a sufficient tax, so that we can give them to people who can't afford to pay.
important enough that we should pay a sufficient tax, so that we can give them to people who can't afford to pay.
The solution, then, is to bail out the corrupt and wasteful government?
I'm not seeing any meaningful way in which this differs from bailing out banks or auto manufacturers. I'm assuming that you agree that those gifts to corporate America were immoral. If you agree about the corporate bailouts, how would this governmental bailout differ?
I was offering a response to the parent, who was asking whether we should pay for sanitation -- not to the situation in the article. I don't know what the right solution to Birmingham's problems is, and I've never even been to Birmingham, so I'm in no position to speculate. However, if and when the local government is capable of functioning well enough to achieve things using money, then working water and sewers should be high on its list.
I don't know if bailing out the "corrupt and wasteful government" is the solution but I think it is meaningfully different.
The difference that immediately springs to mind is that the corruption was in some ways the responsibility of higher levels of government to prevent. The justice system was failing these residents when people engaged in corrupt practices were not caught soon enough to prevent this situation arising. It is difficult to hold the residents who voted fully accountable - they can not be clairvoyant and predict who is or is not corrupt.
Another difference is that governments exist to serve the peoples' interest at all levels, if one level is dysfunctional it does not seem to give all other levels the freedom to ignore it. Giving the reality on the ground right now it is the governments duty to do some kind of cost-benefit analysis to determine what can be done to help these people a great deal while only harming (or perhaps helping) others in other jurisdictions a small amount. (For example based on the information in the article it would seem obvious that sanitation problems among the poor are going to end up being bigger medicare bills for the government to handle at some point given the economic circumstances.)
I do. This isn't 1511, it's 2011. We can make all kinds of appeals to the "noble savage" who survived just fine without porcelain bowls, but that would be disingenuous.
Even disregarding the sanitation, hygiene, and emotional impact of cutting people off from modern sewage, there are efficiency issues. The more time people spend digging latrines and putting up outhouses the less time they have to improve their own lot.
Imagine if we took away roads, and it took you two hours each way to get to the general store!
Infrastructure, luxury or not, are key to pulling this country out of the shit-pit (no pun intended) it's found itself in. Cutting people off from these essential services certainly won't help matters.
Sitting around debating whether or not people are crybabies for demanding modern sewage services, also doesn't help.
"Right" is a term of art. If you are denied a right, you can sue to get that right vindicated. So in that sense running water is not a right.
But what do "rights" have to do with this discussion? Running water may or may not be a right, but it's a basic feature of first world civilization. It is an embarrassment to the nation when a major county in the U.S. can't provide its citizens with running water, because of the greed and corruption of some politicians and some banks.
I was born in Bangladesh (where running water is indeed a luxury for most people), and my dad has spent his life working in public health (not running water, but vaccine programs and the like). These are problems to be dealt with in places like Uganda, not in the United States.
Sanitation and sewers are a public good. My health is directly affected by my neighbors' access to these things. Thus, it is in all of our interests to ensure that we all have access. Whether you call it a "right" or not doesn't much matter, I think. Bottom line is that it's something we ought to have, and cutting some people off from it will harm us all.
Of course its a luxury, but its a cheap and easy one. It can and should be considered a "solved problem" in the "developed" world that this luxury can be extended to all. Letting go of this luxury has health implications to society far beyond the poor it directly effects.
When we have no problem spending billions on foreign wars with dubious moral justifications but can't provide clean water to citizens we have serious priority issues. Its the first really dangerous symptom of what might be a truly horrifying underlying disease.
I'll upvote because I don't think you should be downvoted for expressing an unpopular opinion in a civil manner, and genuinely asking for input on it. But I don't agree.
It's not like we are talking about a small, rural town in middle-of-nowhere Alabama being cut off from cheap sewer access (we might expect this considering infrastructure costs of getting it all set up out that far away from cities). This is Jefferson County, which is the most populated county in Alabama. We've moved past expecting the bare minimum once we get into cities, and we expect a bit more competence from our local governments when it comes to dealing with these pretty basic issues. Without basic sanitation, we don't get large cities.
Remoteness isn't really a factor in how difficult it is to provide water & sanitation services, as long as it's not a fly-in only area. Unless you find yourself in a desert (or tundra), pretty well everywhere has usable groundwater, and as long as there is access by road or water to get building materials on site it shouldn't be prohibitively expensive to transport materials.
I've been to a lot of hole-in-the-wall towns with populations of less than 1,000 in rural California, Ontario and B.C. and I've never once seen a latrine.
Now fly-in Native reserves in northern Canada - that's another story.
Certainly from a libertarian perspective, water and sewage are not. For philosophers like Rothbard, humans have a natural right to not being aggressed against--but not a right to, say, health. Similarly so for authors like Hoppe and Nozick.
All of them believing in libertarianism for consequentialist reasons as well, they would probably view this story as testament to the failures of government, and what happens when it is coopted by businesses.
Edit: I also want to disagree with the other commenters that issues of 'rights' don't matter. Sure, if you're only judging things by their consequences, then that discussion is moot. But having a moral position against the coercion of government (I'm going to take your money to build sewers, roads, engage in multiple wars, etc) is a legitimate stance--even if you disagree with it.
Well, you can draw further distinctions between Rothbard and Nozick (don't know too much about Hoppe). Nozick would support a minimal state whose sole job was to protect property and was financed by government coercion.
Rothbard would go further, though, and say even that minimal state is too much, as it is still coercing people to fund government activity (police protection of property). Even as that end of property enforcement is just, it's still using an immoral means to achieve it.
Which just goes to show that one man's right that deserves government protection is another's coercion. I respect Rothbard's consistency, because it's quite problematic for the run-of-the-mill libertarian to argue for some forms of positive liberty (the right to government provision of property enforcement) while saying that other forms of positive liberty are categorically unjust (such as, say, the right to government provision of running water).
Rothbard is like Plato. Interesting thinker from a historical perspective, but it's not like we still take the Earth, Wind, Fire, Water thing seriously.
That particular strain of libertarianism is indefensible on anything other than religious grounds ("Property is a god-given right while water isn't") or something equally metaphysical.
I doubt Rothboard would describe his viewpoint as being simply that "property is a god-given right while water isn't," even if you exclude the god-given part. It's more that property is an institution that develops from organic human action and self-organization. And in his vision people end up self-organizing into groups that will defend some version of property rights using threat of violence if necessary, and he goes further and thinks that, due to the nature of the market of violence, most will converge onto roughly similar versions of property that are best suited for human living.
My take on that is that this has already happened, but as it turns out the market of violence lends itself to aggregation and monopoly. We call this monopoly supplier of violence the State, which has found it utility maximizing to form a set of contracts, implicit and explicit, with most of the different parts of society, including price discrimination, loss leaders, etc.
In other words, Rothbard left out public choice and the economics of the firm, and when you add those into anarcho-capitalism you get... social democracy.
I deeply admire, though, his capability to imagine a different, more decentralized, and free-er world. Like most visionaries, his greatest flaw and strength is his utopianism.
Rothbard is an interesting one in this case, though. He didn't think things like water were a right, but he also didn't think that most current corporations legitimately owned their property, since its acquisition was tainted (in most cases) by deep entanglement with government. He wasn't entirely consistent on the remedy, but at times he agreed with leftists that it was legitimate for workers to expropriate their employers' property and reconstitute factories/etc. under new ownership, though he disagreed on the reasons why. This entanglement between JP Morgan and the Birmingham government is an illustration of why he came to those kinds of conclusions (viz., that JP Morgan's "property" is illegitimate, accrued in part via aggression as an ally of the state).
I would imagine that there are restrictions preventing the residents from installing septic tanks so their only option was the sewer system run by the city. The libertarian perspective would allow them to install their own sewage handling system as long as it didn't adversely affect others.
Interesting thought. I lived in Zambia for 6 years without running water and we got used to it. Fortunately for us, we had a gardner that spent half his day filling up our water drums...
My point is: I have been there and at the time didn't think much of it. But after living in the USA for 16+ years now, I can't even imagine being without running water.
So, is it a right or a luxury? I don't know... 17 years ago, I would have said luxury but now, my answer would be it's a right...
Right vs luxury I think is a false dichotomy. There exists a third classification: public utility. According to my apartment complex, incoming water is a public utility, and as long as you pay property taxes they have no right to shut it off. In my state (or area, I don't know), it's illegal to charge for incoming water. They can charge for outgoing because sewage access is not a public utility.
This only goes for places where it is illegal to drill a well.
>gardner that spent half his day filling up our water drums
Would you not consider this a luxury? I expect your gardner did not have someone filling up his drums waiting at home for him. I've been in natural disaster areas where water and power weren't available, we made do but it also became what we spent 1/3 of the day managing around (hauling water, getting things done before nightfall etc).
Most people can hardly imagine life without their iPhone... but that hardly makes cell-service a right.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. We had a well, no central heat-and-air, and a septic system in our back yard. This worked just fine. We had the same quality of life (aside from freezing in the cold winters) that everyone in large cities had.
The difference is that we owned the equipment to take care of ourselves, instead of the local government.
I'm kind of new-ish to HN, so I was wondering how you guys lean (if at all).
Also, it bothers me that there is usually no competition amongst utility providers. Where I live, we have one choice for electricity (short of generating your own), one choice for sewage (there _are_ other options, such as personal sewage systems), and one choice for garbage removal.
I think that if we could find ways to create more options, we could create a better situation for the folks in referenced in the article (and elsewhere).
False dichotomy. Access to running water is not a luxury. I think that word is too loaded to use technically here.
In the context of a country where running water is ubiquitous, it is a horror that people have no infrastructure providing running water. It's not a "right" in the platonic sense, but I think I can say fairly objectively that it comes close to that status. That's really all that matters.
What can you really do with the information that water should be a "luxury" in the technical sense? Leave everyone t their own devices?
I don't think it is a right but a public health necessity. This should never happen in a developed country. Sewerage pricing here (.au) is linked to property value so the poor pay less. Water is charged by the kL and while it may be expensive for large manicured gardens is quite affordable for basic hygiene.
It is incredibly callus to suggest that poor (mostly black) people do not deserve such basic necessities as drinkable water and sanitary disposal of their own excrement.
Please don't muddy the waters with an insinuation of racism. He never once mentioned race, just asked whether or not something was a right or a luxury and gave his opinion. You can argue against it effectively without once ever bringing up race, because race makes no difference on the issue of whether or not cheap access to sanitation services is a right or a privilege.
I could be wrong here, as I don't know the races of all the parties are politicians involved, but I would hazard a guess that race isn't as big as an issue here as you might think, as blacks are the major majority in Birmingham, and in this case, it's probably just politicians (likely black) screwing over citizens (also likely black). Correct me if I'm missing something.
The city politicians (corrupt and incompetent, likely both) were almost certainly black, if the situation is anything like my hometown.
But there's a long history of racial tensions in Alabama, and nowadays one of the main ways it's expressed is through the white-dominated state government absolutely hating the city of Birmingham.* A combination of under funding and interference in local matters makes it very hard for an already poor city to prosper and, some would say, fosters a corruption-inducing urban insularity.
And now the families who lack indoor plumbing and running water? Suffice it to say that if they were mostly white, state politicians would be much more interested in remedying their situation.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm projecting my Georgia experiences. (I will note that Alabama is, if anything, less cosmopolitan than Georgia, so I doubt I'm being too harsh on them.)
*This is a repeated pattern through the South: compare, for instance, the Atlanta/Georgia divide. It goes beyond the typical urban/rural divide.
I don't think it is appropriate to gloss over the fact that race and poverty are often correlated in the United States.
I can understand why you think I was insinuating that the OP was racist, but that was not my intention. My intention was to point out that his 'academic' question was incredibly callus toward a population that is regularly and systematically disadvantaged on multiple fronts. .
To call him a troll could brush aside a few things worth our attention. Disturbingly enough, a statistically significant number of people in the U.S. actually hold viewpoints like these, and unfortunately a few of them occasionally comment on this site. So to call it trolling would be to ignore the depth of the ignorance and repugnance of these peoples' viewpoints, and the menace it poses to society. It's important to recognize these people and bring into the light their extreme right-wing philosophy at every opportunity. You judge a society by how it treats its least — not most — fortunate members.
To be clear, I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I usually hang out on liberal politics, social justice, and assorted culture blogs. In many instances, you get people coming in and saying terrible, hateful, and/or violent things to bloggers, especially when the topic of sexism comes up. In that context, they were still called trolls and for me, the troll label was meant to reinforce my opinion that what they said was Not Okay.
Additionally, based on the initial line ("At the risk of being accused of trolling"), it seemed obvious that the OP KNEW that what they were about to say was terrible and/or offensive. That comment was an attempt to confirm that yes, what they said was bad and they should feel bad.
A right to reasonable access to sanitation, yes; the alternative is disease, and that's no good for anyone. That doesn't mean it should be free, of course.
If you're going to get that philosophical about "what is a right", you may as well just end up and state that only might makes right. It doesn't really add anything of real value to the conversation.
I mean, what rights aren't luxuries in some form or another? Voting? Luxury. Not being a slave? Luxury. You can still live, breathe, and procreate without access to either of those things.
Am I the only one here that believes that running water is a luxury, not a right?
I've been in some pretty shitty situations myself, though none as tough as this. That much I freely admit. But the overall tone of the article seems to be one of horror that people might not have a ceramic toilet which flushes the waste away to a sewage treatment plant. Also, an attitude of "This is a first world country; this shouldn't be happening to anyone". (Yes, I noticed the sidebar on "corruption")
Does everybody else think that running water/sewage is a right?