Normally, your neighbor wouldn’t think of coming to your door to demand that you provide him with a jug of water or a week’s worth of groceries. In bad times, he might swallow enough pride to ask for such things, maybe even beg. It takes a particular gall to demand them.
Recently, Detroit provided a glimpse into America’s future, as we continue our historic transformation. People took to the streets, demanding they be given water, which many find themselves without for a variety of reasons. Yours truly suspects it has to do with government interference and malfeasance. Mind you, these people can have as much water as they will pay for. For them, that’s the problem: they must pay for it.
The news photo jumped off the page of a woman wearing a T-shirt proclaiming, “Water is a Human Right.”
That’s what it’s come to. Water viewed as a “human right.”
Dear Reader, you may have become so accustomed to our transformation that your sensibilities weren’t jarred by that statement. After all, everyone needs water. Without water, life would end.
But the same can be said of food and, to a slightly lesser extent, housing. In fact, the same case can be made for money, or some facsimile of money to be exchanged to receive life’s necessities, such as water, food and housing.
The difficulty here is none of us has a “right” to these things, necessary as they may be.
The founders understood the concept of rights, as opposed to needs and wants. You have a right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and, as the early draft of the Declaration of Independence included, “property.”
By property, the founders meant the right to ownership. If you think about it, ownership encompasses all other rights. If you don’t own your life, who does? If your liberty isn’t owned by you, then by whom? If you don’t own the right to pursue happiness, you are reduced to a surrogate through which someone else lives vicariously.
By exercising the rights that you own, you can acquire things you need or want. Like water.
These intrinsic rights recognized by the founders are God-given. Because of that, they are inherently available, or as the founders described them, “unalienable.” It is only by someone improperly violating these rights that you can be denied them.
A natural, God-given right is something no neighbor or government can give you. You are born with it. You have the ability to fulfill it simply by acting on it. Your right to life, for example, requires only that you live in order to enjoy it. No one else must do anything to provide it. Moreover, because it’s a right, others also may not interfere with you exercising it.
Compare that to the claim to have a right to water, which is almost always something a neighbor or a government gives you in exchange for money. Someone else usually owns the source of the water, a reservoir, lake or river. In the case of publicly owned water sources, owners change, but the concept of ownership doesn’t. The owner prevents his lake or stream from being completely drained overnight by selling water, not giving it away. Prices are built-in conservation methods. Probably the best kind.
When someone else owns water, it doesn’t belong to you. For you to get any, you must pay for it. Otherwise, to fulfill your want or need for water, you would have to violate the water owner’s property right of ownership.
It’s unclear why Detroit, which sits next to the largest freshwater repository in North America, has trouble providing water to its 175,000 residential water customers. A good guess is that it has something to do with government, the most inefficient provider of important things.
The city shuts off water when bills go unpaid, but apparently not everyone’s uniformly, or even at the same point of nonpayment. An astounding half of Detroit’s water customers are delinquent on their water bills, an average of $540 each. One woman identified by the Wall Street Journal reportedly owes “about $10,000.” She complains: “There is still an affordability problem.” How much more free water provided by someone else would it take to make water affordable in her view?
T-shirts worn by protesters on Detroit streets also were emblazoned with the demand, “Stop the shutoffs.” How much free water do those not paying for it imagine they have a right to?
These are multilayered problems, probably rooted in the city’s ownership of water, then its inefficient delivery and pricing that’s divorced from supply and demand. That’s all exacerbated by demands for more free water.
It’s unlikely the problem will be resolved without violating someone’s God-given rights by pretending that someone else has a “human right” to someone else’s water.