The FT published two letters today on the Segerfeldt article (and somehow, didn't manage to publish mine). (The letters are not on the FT website, as far as I can tell, although others are.)

One, by the Director of the "Water for All' campaign at Public Citizen, makes a poor analogy that deserves rebuttal:

"Private interests do not take better care of natural resources than public interests. Consider the extractive industries, such as mining, that have destroyed the land in order to extract as much of a given commodity as is possible. Now think about public parks. If private interests owned these priceless treasures, many of them would likely be covered with housing developments and unavailable to the public."

Let's break this down: (1) comparing mining to parks is like, well, comparing mining to parks. Let's look, instead, at how public and private entities manage similar land uses. As it turns out, there is an excellent body of literature on this, much available through the PERC website, that shows that private management of forest resources results in better land management than public management of those same types of resources. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that public management of parks is pretty shoddy in an alarming number of cases (remember the sewage problems in Yellowstone, the "crown jewel" of the national park system?) and that state owned mining entities have done plenty of destructive behavior.

(2) Would private ownership mean parks were converted to housing developments? There is no reason to think this would happen. Private land ownership of environmentally valuable resources might produce less public access, particularly if reducing public access enhanced the environmental amenities - consider the Turner ranches in Montana. Turner reduced public access (you pay to hunt now) but greatly enhanced the environmental amenities produced by his property, investing enormous amounts of money in restoring meadows and the like.

The other letter, from the "Campaigns Policy Officer" of the "World Development Movement" argues that "The private sector admits that it simply cannot deliver the investment required to enable the world's poorest communities to access clean water and adequate sanitation. Extending access to water for the poor can only happen through the public sector." The proof? A water company CEO who says "substantial grants and soft loans are unavoidable to meet required investment levels."

Again, let's unpack this. (1) water systems require more investment than the private sector - with access to billions in capital through the world's financial markets - can muster yet somehow governments are going to find this money and we know this (2) because a water company CEO lobbied for subsidies. Might we be just the slightest bit skeptical that governments have access to untapped pools of capital and that companies lobbying for subsidies might cry poverty?