Lets switch the playing field a bit. I once lived at 9000 feet above sea level 30 miles west of denver in the mountains. We got 250 inches of snow a year and in the summer we received regular afternoon rainstorms.
In my second year there I placed water drums at all corners of my house to collect rainwater and snow melt. The water fell on my property so I thought everything was good. I could then use that to water my plants rather then use my well water.
About 3 months after I placed the water drums I received a several hundred dollar fine on my front door step by the city of denver. Mind you I was living 30 miles outside the city limits. Turns out by some legal fabrication they were able to stake a claim of ownership of every rain drop that fell on my land. All the water that fell on my property was the property of the city of Denver. (ON a side note, I wish I could offload the damage expense heavy snow causes to my proprety to Denver since it;s apparently theirs).
Now here is a situation where the local governmetn has no power to turn off any utility to keep me from doign what I am doing. As I find out though they can arrest me and jail me for not complying. That is force. That is theft. That is extortion. That is the kind of system you are advocating.
Think outside of the box. Your basing your entire argument on an infrastrucutre built by government. Whos to say you won’t have a huge tank in the back of your house or neighborhood? Then you could subscribe to whichever serfvice provider you wanted.
Perhaps in a free market dense area’s would have a better switching system for water. The point is, in a free market there is insentive to innovate ways of delivering service. In a collective market that insentive does not exist, so what you get is a single way of doing things. FOllowed by a bunch of people incapable of thinking outside of the box assung that god gave us government to build roads, provide water and electricity.
You only named services provided by the government. That is ofcoarse a correct definition of utility.
Utility - a company that performs a public service; subject to government regulation
But ultimately cannot be used to defend your case. Since tomorrow the government could arbritrarily decide to provide food. Then food would become a utility. All public services have really have nothing in common other then they are being provided by the government. So as I said earlier, had government provided internet, you would be defending that as well. But I imagine, if the government provided internet it probably wouldn’t be what it is today, and wouldn’t be used by nearly as many people.
Nope. He’s going to rescue his village from being burnt down. Your the one initiating violence by using a gun to steal his fire retardant water for your own purposes. Your idea of force is deeply in error.
I have repeatedly listed the kinds of thing that I meant by utility. I am not defending any specific government that may have chosen to become the supplier of something inappropriate. If I chose the wrong word and misled you then I am sorry. Maybe I need to invent a new word “mutility” meaning the things that mick thinks should be provided by the government. Now do a search and replace of utility with mutility in every message I’ve posted and please accept my apologies.
I was asking about the initial scenario without the fire.
You are showing your ignorance. Water drums are a common feature of the countryside, regardless of whether the house in question is hyper-modern or extremely rustic.
why are two or three or whatever ‘water’ pipes running under my street ‘too many’ ? is it for the same reason that having 2 or 3 sneaker factories in my neighbourhood is too many?
I understand what your saying. I’m trying to get you to think about what constitutes a utility. How do you decide whats better managed socially and whats not? Who makes these decisions? Who has such forsight? I still highly recommend you taking a look at Economic Calculation in the Socalist Commonwealth.
To answer your question, the only aggressor is you, who is trying to steal an honest man’s water.
Do you think we ought to reward those who make no attempt at being economically responsible?
If you’ve ever lived outside of the city you know that most water comes from wells. Just like the old days, so it is today. What, did you think they pumped water from the desert of denver in a pipe 30 miles back up into the mountains and up 4000 feet of altitude?
The rockies are the source of water for alot of people, It made more sense for me to harvest the water where I was. Using rain water is better for the plants and such.
However, if you feel that the task is not performed to your satisfaction, you can easily switch the provider nonetheless, no matter if there are “weak market forces” or “strong market forces”.
I don’t think that people here are against reasonable use of force (like getting money directly from the bank) if it is due to a breach of contract of the client (it’s not really aggression but rather a king of self-defence).
It’s your own fault if you are not smart enough to not do a 25 year long term contract. However, even with a long term contract, you can decided for yourself. And the provider is bound to the terms and conditions, whereas government’s life long contract does not have any terms and conditions at all.
Well, if the reading of contracts is such a horrible thing, it’s a necessary evil, as it is rather impossible to make a reasonable decision without knowing what exactly you agree to, and it’s impossible to have interaction between the members of a complex society without contracts.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to switch an electricity provider even under our current system (at least in Germany). Same goes with gas and water. Roads might be a bit tricky, depending on the road concerned, but policing should not be a problem at all, either, as it’s up to you whom you’ll ask to provide your security, and why should there not be more than one security agency active in a certain area?
The root of your argument appears to be a discomfort in making judgments, as demonstrated by your many commitment issues regarding contracts. Perhaps a compromise can be achieved by, when in an Anarcho-Capitalist society, voluntarily ceding your cognitive functions to a third party. I am sure there are many who would be happy to take on a PHD full-time. You then voluntarily recieve a parental figure and we can avoid being forcefully drawn into your lifestyle choice. Win-win? I mean this as a completely serious/workable solution to your problem.
Very interesting article… thinking about the article and other things, I would suggest that there seem to be three mechanisms for"private" utility provision:
Franchise
Wrapper private companies
Proper competition
I had better explain my newly invented term “wrapper private companies” (there is probably a better term but I don’t know it) Having a choice of wrapper companies is rather like wanting to buy a bag of coal when there is only one coal mine and one coal mining company. The government want to enforce a tiny bit of competition in to this monopoly scenario so they say “lets have a variety of companies acting as middle men between the mine and the customer”. One will wrap the coal in paper bags, the other will sell it in plastic ones, and another may insist you bring your own recycled containers. Obviously the price and quality difference between the companies will be very small because they all have to buy from the same source and getting the coal out of the ground is by far the most expensive component of the final selling price. So when some people here have said “I can switch providers with an email!”, what they actually mean is they can switch wrapper companies.
So with scenario 1&2 I maintain that it is still very difficult to properly switch providers.
Scenario 3 is something I confess I had not given much thought to and had assumed was unreasonable. I suspect that the difficulty of getting scenario 3 to work is highly dependent on the utility. I guess it depends very much on the physical characteristics of the utility. For example if the utility comes down thin low voltage, or fibre optic wires then that is a lot easier to arrange than a utility that comes down large pipes. Now from the discussions about private roads, I found it was extremely informative to hear from you all about the types of places around the world where private roads existed. And what I’d like to do now is ask for any examples of scenario 3 working around the world. I would dearly love to hear what comes up. Is there anywhere on earth today where scenario 3 exists for water or sewage disposal? gas? electricity? are they in the countryside? cities? up mountains? Only for very large consumers like factories? Please tell.
I just had another thought in relation to an earlier question about the definition of a utility… maybe it should be defined as:
A resource where it is impractical to arrange to have the supplier of that resource different to that of your neighbor.
If its difficult, then you are forced to agree with your neighbor (or perhaps go without, or perhaps get the resource through some extremely clumsy and expensive mechanism)… and I know how you anarchists hate to have to agree with your neighbors!
Another thought… about the “scenario 3” from my last post. If scenario 3 is practical and profitable for latecoming companies then presumably governments throughout the world must be being continually pestered by requests from utility providers to provide alternative utilities. Presumably some governments somewhere will have said “ok, go ahead” perhaps just in one or two towns as a trial. Surely Mrs Thatcher would have said “ok, go ahead” if she were asked. She’d have loved that sort of thing. And yet I can’t think of any town in the UK with doubled up water/gas/electricity provision. Maybe that’s just ignorance on my part. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
