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I think it's worth noting that these people were not 'losing their fundamental right to water'; the government was not going to put the military around every su

I think it's worth noting that these people were not 'losing their fundamental right to water'; the government was not going to put the military around every super market or water source and deny people who hadn't paid their bills. These people are losing a service they're no longer paying for, which is water delivered directly to their home.

tbihl 10y ago
I don't think that the facts you point to are lost on anyone here, though certainly some have a different interpretation. I sometimes agree with this interpretation of 'positive human rights.' But I'd encourage you, in this case, to think about what has happened in Detroit. The bottom fell out from under that city. There were a lot of dumb decisions made in the development, especially in how much they focused on horizontal-only growth. But it seems unlikely that the citizens could recognize it. Have you/would you check on the long-term finances of a municipality before you moved there? Inspect the grants they've received, conduct traffic studies to see if the infrastructure is justified and supported, and inspect their costs and funding means of infrastructure maintenance? Those are deeply-hidden systemic problems; not intentionally hidden, but completely obscured from the public eye nonetheless. If you bought into Detroit a couple decades ago, you probably couldn't see those underlying issues; all you saw was a lot of high-speed roads that let you get a big place for cheap out on the edge of town. Now, decades later, your city has collapsed under the weight of its own largesse, and the main industry has shrunken enormously. Granted, you don't have to be an economist to figure that unions will push large industry away, and that putting all your eggs in one basket is hugely risky, but it can be hard to be so pessimistic in what seems either far in the distant future, or maybe even unlikely to really happen. Anyway, you moved into a city that made implicit guarantees of service, and that crumbled. You moved into a city with economic activity, and that's gone. There are a lot of people who got burnt doing exactly that, and it makes a lot of sense to help those people out. Even if there are some people who move in to take advantage, it still makes our society work better if we try to help out. Detroit wasn't special except in that they were ahead of the times. As more and more municipalities in this country move from soft to hard defaults, we're going to have a lot of people on the hook for bills they were unlikely to see coming, and in the face of economic slumps they never could have imagined. Whether we disingenuously call it a human right, or if we prefer to acknowledge it as community assistance, we're going to need a lot more of it in the coming decades.

tbihl 10y ago

I don't think that the facts you point to are lost on anyone here, though certainly some have a different interpretation. I sometimes agree with this interpretation of 'positive human rights.' But I'd encourage you, in this case, to think about what has happened in Detroit. The bottom fell out from under that city. There were a lot of dumb decisions made in the development, especially in how much they focused on horizontal-only growth. But it seems unlikely that the citizens could recognize it. Have you/would you check on the long-term finances of a municipality before you moved there? Inspect the grants they've received, conduct traffic studies to see if the infrastructure is justified and supported, and inspect their costs and funding means of infrastructure maintenance? Those are deeply-hidden systemic problems; not intentionally hidden, but completely obscured from the public eye nonetheless. If you bought into Detroit a couple decades ago, you probably couldn't see those underlying issues; all you saw was a lot of high-speed roads that let you get a big place for cheap out on the edge of town. Now, decades later, your city has collapsed under the weight of its own largesse, and the main industry has shrunken enormously. Granted, you don't have to be an economist to figure that unions will push large industry away, and that putting all your eggs in one basket is hugely risky, but it can be hard to be so pessimistic in what seems either far in the distant future, or maybe even unlikely to really happen. Anyway, you moved into a city that made implicit guarantees of service, and that crumbled. You moved into a city with economic activity, and that's gone. There are a lot of people who got burnt doing exactly that, and it makes a lot of sense to help those people out. Even if there are some people who move in to take advantage, it still makes our society work better if we try to help out. Detroit wasn't special except in that they were ahead of the times. As more and more municipalities in this country move from soft to hard defaults, we're going to have a lot of people on the hook for bills they were unlikely to see coming, and in the face of economic slumps they never could have imagined. Whether we disingenuously call it a human right, or if we prefer to acknowledge it as community assistance, we're going to need a lot more of it in the coming decades.