I have a beginners question which may sound very stupid, but please bear with me and try to answer it.[:)]
I am curious to find out the members’ thoughts on the privatization of air and water bodies. I do believe by privatizing these essential commodities, we can ensure that everyone has enough air and water only provided they have the economic wherewithal. The current state of socialist air and water has been troubling me for a while since we know for a fact that if something is owned by everyone then no one owns it and it goes to a state of utter ruin and destruction, like all government programs.
So, you think its an economically wise thing? I can see how rocks and dirt should be privatized in terms of owning them. This may sound naive, but I’m just interested in learning about it.
Air and water are not generally considered scarce, and hence for all intents and purposes do not need to be economised, and therefore treated as goods, at least under the Earth’s current conditions.
One could perfectly imagine a situation in which they could be, e.g. perhaps in space or on a space colony inhabited by humans, in which quantitative limits on these resources actually do place a limit on their allocation in production and consumption.
In such a case, economisation would be wise, and privatisation the most productive way of doing so.
An individual rock and a handful of dirt are scarce. So are the air in an air tank and water in a swimming pool.
If one is to make the case that air an water and not scarce because there are a lot of each, then it would make sense that humans aren’t scarce either.
Being scarce is different to being quantitatively limited however. To not be scarce, it must be possible to satisfy all possible human wants for a commodity with the given supply, hence not requiring it to be economised as a good. I think this can be said of air and water, when considering global conditions.
An example of such a commodity that is not scarce would be Nitrogen in the Haber process.
Obviously, your point is valid with regard to air in an air tank, and when considering the locally extracted water that fills a pool. I was under the impression however, that it the water generally is not treated as scarce, only the areas it resides, like rivers and lakes. Then again, when one has a container one has gathered rainwater with, one clearly owns the water, or could be said to have “homesteaded” it… I think this might need more careful consideration than I originally gave, and does of course depend on the environment.