You're Not Thirsty, You're Sampling A Marketing Strategy

The demands of the water supply market are expected to grow by twenty per cent in the next five years, according to something called Global Water Intelligence. The demand, of course, is not that of the people who utilise the moisturising resources in question, but that of the private companies which intend to take over the supplies and then sell them back to those who can afford them. As we all know, it's more efficient that way: "If you have a contractor and the contractor doesn't deliver you can beat him over the head", according to the publisher of Global Water Intelligence, who seems to have a somewhat idealised view of the typical relationship between private contractors and those who are supposed to regulate them. The CEO of the moisture division of Black and Veatch noted that "it takes a bit of pressure off the local officials if they can shift that to somebody who's less impacted by the politics"; in Standard English, this means that politicians, who are nominally accountable to the public and suffer occasional personal inconvenience and curtailed expenses thereby, often find it helpful to offload their responsibilities onto corporations which are not accountable to the public and, in the event of profit margins expanding from the merely injurious to the insulting, tend to have more money with which to outspend their captive markets in the courts. Nevertheless, despite all the advantages of moisture privatisation, there is still widespread opposition because supplies are still "seen as a life-giving public service", rather than as just another commodity like public transport, health, education and, soon enough, the air that we breathe.