The market allocates according to ability/willingness to pay. This is perfectly fine in general, but doesn't work so well when "ability" enters the picture for something considered a necessity.
I'd much rather pay for what I need from a competitive marketplace that is constantly driving down the cost of everything than leave it up to monopolistic government to hand out the privilege of drinking water.
The market works damn well for the vast majority of things with which government has not blessed with its involvement.
Water is no different than most things. In fact, it falls out of the sky in a lot of places.
Places where its difficult to obtain water usually have plenty of government managing the privileges.
The free market is people peacefully trading with each other. Most government is coercion. I don't see how more of it is a solution.
Even accepting that water is no different than say cars, I disagree with the peacefulness of the free market. The free market is all about competition. In this case, competition drives the groundwater table down fast (a couple of meters a year, in some places), and forces everybody to play the game of drilling ever deeper holes.
Can you tell me a place where the free market rules where can't get the clean water you need to live for far less than an hour's worth of labor at the lowest paid job?
I can think of plenty where the use of force rules where its not even possible to get any clean water at all.
The UN's problem is hardly with countries where people are allowed to trade and keep what they earn.
Markets are a means of managing scarcity. Oxygen is not scarce, at least not if you're at sea level and you don't mind it mixed about 5:1 with nitrogen and a bunch of other gases.
For use in places where oxygen is scarce — like on top of a tall mountain or in an unpressurized aircraft at high altitude — you'll find that the stuff is very commonly bought and sold.
On the other hand scholars[1] have argued that much of the first world have made the bulk of their progress in very protectionist environments and have opened their markets selectively when it was to their advantage. I havent seen those arguments debunked effectively. The notion of "free"ness of current markets is also debatable given that it is guarded strongly by international politics.
Mathematically speaking, I do not recollect that free markets guarantee equity as has been claimed in some comments here. They do guarantee an equilibrium, which however need not be a good/desirable one.(Think traffic flow without signals).
I am not against free markets, I think thats perhaps the best option available, but as long as it remains easy to externalize costs, it will continue to remain broken. Because what you are paying is only part of the cost and someone else is being forced to pick up the tab.
When our activities impose costs on others, that should be remedied. If my making a buck creates a nickel's worth of pollution damage to you, I should be made to pay that nickel.
That doesn't make a market less free, as one has the right to be free of the pollution of others too. A "free" market recognizes the rights of all involved.
And it actually makes markets more efficient. If I am making a buck and it costs you $5 in pollution, an efficient market sends me a clear signal to stop.
But it seems to me that government is more in the business of shifting benefits to some for political purposes and shifting costs to its opponents. And that is not helping protect anybody's rights.
The key here is as you said "I should be made to pay that nickel". Unfortunately free market forces alone will not make you do that. It will be in your interest to hold on to that nickel. It is here the free market proponents invoke goodness of human kind or some other force or argument external to the free market principles.
Another problem with the practice of free market is that corporations are typically structured to maximize, not the total value out of a resource, but the rate, i.e. the value extracted per unit time. It makes perfect sense for them because for several reasons (and also by way of force) they can keep the acquisition cost of a substitute resource very low.
Governments arent ideal either. But a (democratic) government is shaped by the amount of active interest a voter takes. So the control over it is much more direct in comparison.
Sans the two major loop-holes, free market is a damn good system.
Then few if any free markets actually exist.
Some traders are indeed "peaceful." The brute fact, though, is that that many market participants actively seek out ways:
A) to inhibit competition, or even prevent it completely, for example by anticompetitive business practices; and/or ...
B) to make the public pick up the tab for costs while keeping revenues for themselves -- think pollution costs and bank bailouts, to name just two examples; and/or ...
[EDIT:] C) in some cases, to flat-out lie, cheat, and steal.
FOOTNOTE: As I understand it, economists refer to B as privatizing profits while socializing costs, a.k.a. "externalities."
These human tendencies to do A, B, and C above appear to be fundamental facts of life. Left unchecked, they can have a corrosive effect on markets.
There's ample room for evidence-based debates about how best to deal with these tendencies. But it doesn't seem to have done much good to insist that free markets are a cure-all -- it's reminiscent of the old economist joke whose punch line is "we'll just assume we have a can opener."
> Most government is coercion. I don't see how more of it is a solution.
It's certainly true that when government regulation is driven by untested ideology, or by private interests, it can make things worse by discouraging private initiative and effort. (Some of the ways market predators try to do A and B above is by encouraging government actors to enact legislation and regulations that favor them.) We've certainly seen that happen at various times in various places.
But governmental regulation, selectively applied, can also be at least a partial solution, to the extent it can help keep market predators from doing A, B, and C above.
> But governmental regulation, selectively applied, can also be at
> least a partial solution, to the extent it can help keep market
> predators from doing A, B, and C above.
However, those who propose government regulation seem to not perceive government as anything other than an objective benevolent force, and when they are presented with evidence of government being corrupt, they blame the corporations for corrupting them.
I postulate that if there were less (or no) corporate lobbying of legislators/regulators, then there would be significantly less corruption. Blaming the corporations for corrupting the government, while naive, isn't that far from the mark.
The very essence of government is corruption. It is simply the mafia with an indoctrination program that teaches kids to believe that it isn't evil.
Government is the worst way of regulating and enforcing a free market, except for everything else that's been tried.