Water madness in Detroit

It would take more peeling back the layers than there is really space for in a post on this specific aspect of Detroit's situation.  You know the basics:  the 1967 race riot that began driving industry out of the city, 50 years of corruption and mismanagement, unsustainable pension packages in both the governmental sector and the auto industry.

The upshot: shrinkage to the point where what was once America's fifth largest city is now smaller than Columbus, Ohio.  Bankruptcy and a shell government that has had to step aside for a team of crisis-management experts.  Huge swaths of blocks of vacant lots and abandoned buildings, both commercial and residential.

So in March, the city water service served notice that customers more than two months behind on water bills would be cut off.

This led to downtown protests along Grand Avenue last week.

Nurses wanted to work the public-health angle:

A group called National Nurses United, which led a march and protest downtown Friday near Cobo Center, said the shut-offs pose a public health emergency and demanded an immediate moratorium on them. The group’s co-president, Jean Ross, has called the shut-offs an “attack on the basic human right of access to safe, clean water.”

Others wanted to do the demonize-corporations thing, as well as turn their municipal sovereignty over to an obsolete and ineffective global entity:

Demonstrators chanted “Who’s on their side? Corporations. Who’s on our side? United Nations.”

A prominent Freedom-Hater politician wants to make individual households' personal financial business the state's business:

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer on Friday called for a moratorium on Detroit’s water shut-offs until city officials can assess who has the financial means to pay off delinquent accounts — and who doesn’t.

Memo to Schauer:  By definition, if they have the means to pay and a lick of sense, their water is still on.

Two main things that need to be yelled at maximum volume about this little scenario:

One is the LITD First Law of Economics:  The money has to come from somewhere.  Just has to.  And, due to the reasons cited in paragraph one of this post, neither producer nor consumer has any.  So the water ain't happening.

The other is that there is no right to water, just like there is no right to health care, a job or "affordable" housing.  It's impossible by definition to have a right to something that requires your fellow human being to do something.

I got into this with somebody on FB and that person tried to tie it in with the right to life.  Here's the relationship between hydrogen oxide: You should be able to seek to obtain water with the expectation that you won't be killed while doing so.

Sheesh.

Detroit is a perfect example of the importance of a geographic and political entity coming to its senses about economics before the consequences are so flippin' dire.