 Hello everybody, it's nice to be back on YouTube again. It's been a while I am now broadcasting from a top-secret location on the other side of the world So let's get started today. I want to offer some criticism and a little praise of this book water for sale now It's it was written six years ago now or seven years to be to be exact But it's it's well written and well researched a lot of great data it's a nice easy short read as you can see and And it's a really specific topic an interesting topic So let's get started. He starts by saying something that we've all probably heard Water is a basic human right not a commodity to be bought sold and Traded and then he proceeds to just annihilate this argument. Just blow it out of the water It's fantastic. One one thing you never hear from these anti-water privatization Socialists is how much water is there in the world? Don't you think that's an interesting question? It was interesting to me. He's done the research Not including salt water and frozen water just looking at the fresh water There is is a two million three hundred thousand liters per capita on planet earth Rainfall alone Subtracting the evaporation that happens as the raindrops are falling through the air The the the water that lands on the ground from rain averages 1,000 liters per day per person. I think that's pretty amazing There is clearly no shortage of water in the world. What there is is a substantial excess of government so The author Frederick Segerfels he's done great work here Like I said well written well researched We we are different flavors of libertarian and I think those differences become become quite apparent He's he's from Kato or was with Kato when he wrote this book and there there are impurices there Unlike the the Mises Institute folks Who are who are rationalists? I think economics is and must be a rational science There's no time for that discussion now But I think the empiricism is useful that helps people imagine what a free society might look like and how a free society might work and Being able to imagine it for most people might be even more important than making the rational case So he offers a ton of examples. I'll read just one or parts of one At the beginning of the 1980s the Chilean government granted farmers companies and local authorities The right to own local water This enabled them to sell it in a free market and affected them the effects have been outstanding Water supply has grown faster than in any other country 30 years ago only 27 percent of rural Chileans and 63 percent in urban communities 27 and 63 percent had steady access to safe water today's figures are 94 and 99% Respectively the highest for all the world's medium income nations Then oh it he goes on he talks about how just the fact that water is Sensitive to market prices causes people to economize water, you know suddenly drip irrigation will replace Spray irrigation when government stops controlling the price He talks about Chilean agriculture. It has moved from low value activities such as cattle farming and cultivation of cereals and Ali aginas, I don't know what that means Plants to fruit and wine production, which is much more lucrative between 1975 and 1990 without any Major infrastructure investment being made Chile raised his agricultural productivity 6% annually in and today is the world's largest exporter of winter fruit in the to the northern hemisphere pretty awesome Chapter 6 might be the most important chapter and There he talks about the effects of supposedly free water that all these anti privatization Socialist control freaks are promoting their free water Has caused all kinds of water-borne diseases among poor people who to whom it is illegal for entrepreneurs to deliver water They talk about the he talks but writes about the distance that poor people have to travel to get to sources of safe water he talks about just the Them waiting in lines and there you see you feel the importance of the argument for a free society and for commerce He talks also about absurdities Urban dwellers pay nearly a thousand times as much for their water as farmers do subsidies and So rice is grown in the desert a water guzzling enterprise at the same time that California cities are spending huge sums of money on this desalination plants That's the price of free water Of course the socialists will say what they always say we just need to manage it better We need a better leader. We need a stronger leader. We need more laws better laws strictly enforced laws What that means implicitly is more police more prisons more batons more tasers more handcuffs It's the road to serve them He also notes that in many places the poor people pay Pay 12 times as much for water as like the As the government price because you know, there's no one brings water to them So that he writes about that black market. Oh, and this is a really interesting detail Of course the black market comes to the rescue in India in India for example several states have quite advanced and informal water markets the profit from this trade Have been estimated at one point three eight Billion annually the problem though is that the trade is illegal There's your your free water socialists here. We we deviate as libertarians He he talks about how great it would be if there was a free market for water But then he makes these absurd statements as far as I'm concerned But it is worth repeating That public authorities are still at liberty to control the price of water supplied privately hmm He departs from from the the strict free market view even further Even further with statements like just a second Water distribution is a natural monopoly and Private monopolies unlike public ones cannot be influenced through general elections Lord help us if we're relying on general elections that Yeah, I'm not I'm not even gonna address that. It's just too painful But he contradicts himself, you know, he says He later he says people would simply go elsewhere for their water as is common Especially among the billion or more people who at present do not have access to pipe water so much for the natural monopoly And towards the end of the book he he departs from a discussion of capitalism and Discusses corporatism in its place that is tragically Common with inside the Beltway libertarianism, although they do do great work So he comes to two very unsurprising conclusions number one the private businessmen are better than government bureaucrats at delivering water to people and number two when governments contract with Companies to do water. There's going to be a lot of corruption You don't need any empirical evidence for that although he's an empiricist, so he went at it that way You know, you I could tell you that rationally Make that case last thing Back when I was just still looking for my ideological footing seems like a lifetime ago I came across a documentary called the corporation and They very they upheld this idea of Bolivia's uprising spontaneous Bolshevik uprising against water privatization. So he sheds a lot of light on that You have to read it yourself it starts on page 84 But that you encounter that these anti-water privatization people they cite Bolivia quite frequently But it's not all that simple The the rise in water the rise in price was not that big As as they claim The government of course was corrupt and it required This private company that wanted to deliver water to also build a freaking dam and to hire You know the politically connected contractor to build this dam and just to you know That was the government scheme of funneling money from this privatization So that had a lot to do with increasing the price. Don't you think? And he also writes about how there were some interests behind those supposedly spontaneous protests So so that's that hope you enjoyed my book review. I do recommend it Water for sale by Frederick Segerfeld. Thanks for listening