July 17, 2014 at 1:00 am
There is no right to free waterNolan Finley
Water is not a human right. It’s a human need.
Ever since Adam and Eve got booted out of Eden, people have devoted most of their energy and labor to meeting the basic needs of food, water, clothing and shelter. It’s the origin of work — you’re hungry, you’re thirsty, you need some decent threads and a roof over your head, you have to get up in the morning and do something constructive.
There will be a lot of folks in the streets of Detroit Friday afternoon challenging that truth. The legion of lefties in town for the Netroots Nation gathering have scheduled a march to protest the water shut-offs underway in Detroit as inhumane and a violation of civil rights.
Fully half of the water customers in Detroit don’t pay their bills. Advocates of free water for all blame the city’s 38 percent poverty rate for the high level of delinquency.
But nearly all of those with incomes below the poverty line receive public assistance. That’s money provided by their fellow citizens to help them pay for their basic needs — food, water, clothing, shelter.
And yet barely 50 percent of Detroiters pay their water bill. Meanwhile, up to two-thirds of city residents pay to keep their cable or satellite television service current. And 72 percent do the same to maintain their cellphones.
It’s not a stretch to guess the reason delinquency rates are lower for cable and cellphone service is that the cable and telephone companies cut off customers who don’t pay their bills. The Detroit water department hasn’t done that much, until now.
So instead of using what resources they have to cover their needs, many water customers instead have chosen to service their wants. That’s what happens when people are conditioned to think someone else is responsible for taking care of them.
In Detroit, the someone else is the half of residents who do pay their water bills, and this year were hit with an 11 percent rate increase that was largely necessary to cover the unpaid bills of scofflaws.
Since the cut-offs began, more customers are paying up. The overwhelming majority of households hit with a shut-off are settling their debt to get the water flowing again, suggesting they could have been paying all along. The desperate cases are being offered a variety of assistance programs to make sure no one who truly can’t pay for water is shut off.
This is not a humanitarian crisis, as the Netroots entitlement nation proclaims. It’s a necessary forced reordering of priorities.
Water, food, clothing, shelter were never bestowed on us because we exist. It costs money to purify water and deliver it to homes. That’s why early on people began forming communities to share the cost of meeting that common need, and others.
Charitable minded citizens have never objected to helping care for neighbors who are unable to care for themselves. But they understandably don’t have much appetite for carrying on their backs those who choose to indulge their wants before their needs.
nfinley@detroitnews.com
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From The Detroit News:
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140717/OPINION01/307170005#ixzz37hSvFvjc