You'd notice if it wasn't there...

A friend of a friend works for an anti-bottled-water non-profit. An anti-bottled-water non-profit, you say? Uh huh, I do say. It’s called Corporate Accountability International, and it’s not just about water – it’s about, not surprisingly, corporate accountability. But she works on water.

Their main argument – my favorite one, at least, and the one I remember best – is that the public water supply is fine in almost all cases, and the bottled water industry undermines confidence in it, and, by extension, in publicly provided goods more generally. I thought that was fascinating. I added it to my list of reasons to carry around a small nalgene and fill it from water fountains. Which I do. Which makes me virtuous.

But then this, from my friend at MIT Sloan Jon King, saying that our drinker water supply is mildly contaminated with pharmaceuticals. He remembered that I mentioned this non-profit, and his email just included the link and said “I’m guessing this one’s gonna cause your friend some headaches.” It’s a weird article, to be sure, and it’s probably not a big deal, but in our hypochondriac, hyperafraid society, it’s just the kind of thing that drives $10 billion dollars of bottled water sales annually. That’s more than beer. And we’re not even counting Brita.

This may be a leap – it may be a leap because the government is probably doing its job just fine in almost all cases when it comes to providing clean, safe, cheap drinking water, which is really an impressive thing. But when Jon sent me that article, it put me in mind of the astute observation that a couple of people really nailed after Katrina – if you are in charge of the government and have supreme confidence in your uncommon abilities, intuition, judgment, and rectitude, and the government can’t get things done right, of course it looks to you like “Government” can’t get things done right. What’s really a shame is that, in this day and age, you can build a really powerful political movement that way. Screw everything up, and a lot of people will lose faith in government. And then more and more people end up paying $2-a-pop for water, and pretty soon the only people who need the government to make sure there’s free water are the poor and disenfranchised, and then pretty soon after that the government stops caring about making sure there’s free water.

True, I’ve gone a few steps beyond current reality, but in a rich society with a growing Gini coefficient, I’m calling it like I see it…