[Timm]

Freedom, when it comes to various goods, is provided by availability and choice. These are sometimes enhanced by larger companies producing and distributing goods, and not by smaller ones. WalMart provides lower prices and greater choice than a small local retailer. Food, again, is produced and distributed by large companies, yet is of high quality and abundant in the U.S. Why, then, should we think that what you are calling "local control" is required for freedom generally?

Water may be different than food, you're right, because of the costly infrastructure in place to deliver water to indoor plumbing. But in this respect water is like local phone service. Local phone companies may be, at worst, natural monopolies. This speaks in favor of greater regulation, but not necessarily in favor of public ownership. And long distance service and other wholesale phone services can be provided privately and competitively. Similarly, large scale water supplies can be privately owned without disaster. Oil and natural gas are so provided at the wholesale level, notice, even where local gas utilities are monopolies.

I'm not convinced that water is a natural monopoly, however, despite the plumbing costs. It might be possible for several companies to lay pipe, just as several private railroads built tracks.

In any event, it's hard to understand the complaint about remote ownership of water as something distinct from a complaint about large companies selling hardware, or, again, food, or whatever.

[hedgetrimmer]

This isn't just about remote ownership, its about FOREIGN ownership, NAFTA, GATT and the World Bank.

Foreign interests don't care if you don't have enough water or don't have clean water. The sovereign people do not have dominion over foreign companies as they do over a constitutionally formed municipal water department. You understand that, but you seem to want to play naive for some reason.

Don't forget in California and the West, "Whiskey's for drinking, waters for fighting!"