Decentralizing Our Water Resolves the Fluoridation Question (and Other Dilemmas)

by Scott Lazarowitz
Jan. 10, 2011

This past Friday on the talk shows, Jason Lewis and Mark Levin were both discussing the controversy of fluoridation of the public water supplies, and Robert Wenzel linked to an AP story, and to an article by Murray Rothbard. Some people are saying that critics of water fluoridation are "conspiracy theorists." Rothbard points out the early politicization of water fluoridation, and refers to fluoride as a "highly toxic and probably carcinogenic substance." Now, given Rothbard’s credibility as an overly conscientious practitioner of truth and verification in economics, history, science and so on, I trust Rothbard’s judgment on any subject about which he had written. And for further reading on fluoride, I very much suggest Dr. Donald Miller’s 2005 article, Fluoride Follies, and his more recent one, Fighting Fluoride from last November. And I trust Dr. Miller’s expertise and judgment, too, given that he is the head of cardiothoracic surgery at Seattle VA Medical Center and a professor of surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and is a prestigious heart transplant surgeon. He is very thorough in his extensive research on these issues, and regarding the importance of Vitamin D especially.

But to me, the question isn’t whether or not the State – local municipalities, state governments or the federal government – should or should not fluoridate the water, or add any particular chemicals to the water. To me, the question is whether the State has any legitimate role in water (or any other "utilities") whatsoever. The answer, quite frankly, is no. As I wrote in this blog post last May, collectivization of the water supply is a bad idea:

…There has been a crisis (in the greater Boston area) with our water supply, which is supplied by the Quabbin Reservoir, in which a major pipe burst and the 29 communities who are dependent on the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority for water are being served with untreated "pond water," and told to boil the water for drinking and cooking. It appears as though the problem is almost completely fixed and things should be back to normal tomorrow. The part of the system in question was built by Barletta Companies of Canton, Massachusetts, just 7 years ago, so this reminds me of the Big Dig fiasco in 2006 in which a large piece of tunnel ceiling collapsed and killed a Boston woman, only a few years after that was built. The old saying goes, "They don’t make things like they used to." (Because everything is controlled by the State now!)

But the idea of our water being supplied by one source is also troubling. However, the one community that is not affected by this is ironically the most communist of all these areas, the People’s Republic of Cambridge, home of Harvard University, MIT, and tens of thousands of Marxists, environmentalist wackos and women with hairy legs. Cambridge supplies its own water and is NOT dependent on the MWRA for its water needs.

That a whole population of 2 million people (in the greater Boston area) is dependent on one centralized source of water is just so…Dark Ages, if you ask me. Each community should have its own supply of water, and, in fact, each parcel of property should have a private well with one’s own filtration system. That’s just my opinion on that, and it’s not at all unrealistic…

Collectivism sucks.

And not only is collectivization and State control over the water supply a bad idea, it is a very dangerous idea. We have been seeing in the past year especially how governments, in our case the U.S. government, can tyrannize and oppress their own people, through the Nazi TSA in the airports, through ObamaCare’s government control over an entire population’s critical, private health matters, and through phony insider trading laws and other tyrannical, stifling financial and business regulations. But, while most Americans are not aware of the way that foreign governments have used their power over the collective water supplies to oppress their own people (because most Americans rely on the misinformed mainstream media for their news), Americans should be informed as to not only what the government of Israel has been doing to the people of Gaza regarding its control of their water, but further back in time to the 1990s, what the U.S. government had done to the people of Iraq regarding their water supply.

More recently, during and after the December 2008–January 2009 war between the Israeli military and Hamas (which has been ruling Gaza since 2006), the Israeli military had severely damaged the Gaza water and sewage treatment facilities that to this day have still not been returned to full functioning capacity, and the 1 million-plus population of the Gaza Strip have been forced to use untreated water. Through its paranoid and sadistic blockade of Gaza, the Israeli government has been preventing construction supplies from reaching Gaza to fix the water and sewage treatment facilities, and worse, the Israeli government has been literally preventing the Gaza population from being able to travel outside of Gaza to areas such as Jerusalem to receive medical treatment.

Most Americans do not know these things, because the American media get their information from the Israeli media who get their information from the Israeli government. But had there been actual freedom in Israel and Gaza, and private property ownership and property rights being allowed to occur, allowed by both the Israeli government and Gaza’s Hamas (and by "allowed," I mean "not violated, not trespassed" by their governments), each property where residents live and where businesses are located would be privately owned, people would be protected based on laws against trespass and other property intrusions, and most important as is relevant here, each parcel of property would have its own private well, controlled by the owner(s) of the property. That way, no government agents as well as no other people in general may tamper with individual private property owners’ water supply. Instead, at least in Israel, what we have is a government using the population’s dependence on the government’s stronghold over the "public" water supply as a weapon. That’s just barbaric.

The situation during the 1990s was very similar in Iraq, as far as how the U.S. government treated the people of Iraq after deliberately bombing their electricity and water and sewage treatment facilities. Through the U.S. government’s control and sanctions that prevented reconstruction of those facilities to occur, the population of Iraq were forced to use untreated water. That was followed throughout the ‘90s by a dramatic increase in diseases such as gastroenteritis, cholera and typhoid, and skyrocketing child mortality and cancer rates, which was the U.S. military’s intention. Typical of our modern government bureaucrat ignoramuses, then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright stated on 60 Minutes that such diseases and deaths of over 500,000 Iraqis, many of them children, were "worth it" as a means of regime change and ousting then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, which the then-U.S. regime didn’t even do.

Is my bringing up these actual historical events being a "conspiracy theorist?" Hardly.

So, whether or not the government deliberately puts fluoride into our public water supplies, and whether or not fluoride is a good or bad thing for us or for kids’ teeth, I think that government control over our water, and making us all dependent on the government for our water has been a bad idea, and is potentially dangerous. Given what the U.S. government has done to the people of Iraq, and what the Israeli government has done to the people of Gaza, do not discount the possibility that our own government could actually take advantage of its control over our water for devious purposes.

January 10, 2010

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist at Reasonandjest.com.

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