it was scary to me too when i first saw this movie. the water riots and listening to the guy talking about how everything should and will be privately owned one day. but it's really not that scary when you realize that this is an extremist viewpoint that will never see the light of day in actual policy. you have extremists like him who say that everything--rivers, lakes, mountains, air, etc. should be privately owned and extremists who say that everything should be collectively owned or not owned at all. these are extremist views on how things should work, and then you have how things actually work in the real world.
people like the guy advocating universal private ownership work on deductive reasoning. it's how classical and neoclassical economics works. you start with a simplified general rule (private ownership leads to increased incentive for responsible stewardship and improvement) and then apply it to all situations. whereas, an inductive approach would say, let's look at particular situations and see what we can learn from them. perhaps we can learn that particular situations call for actions that apply best to that particular situation and then come up with a general rule for when you encounter the same or similar situations elsewhere. it's a much more nuanced and realistic approach then the "one size fits all" extremist view.
that second, inductive approach is how our current system has been built--from years of trial and error in policy experience and accumulated data. for instance, the engine of innovation in the u.s. is intimately tied with government research grants into basic science research in universities such as MIT, stanford, carnegie mellon, etc. and government grants in research in particular technologies. from govt agencies such as the NIH, DARPA, and NASA. this is the dirty little secret that privatization advocates shy away from discussing. innovation is, to a large degree, socialized in the united states. private organizations can never hope to accumulate the amount of capital that the u.s. govt has at its discretion. for instance, until very recently, the NIH put billions more dollars into basic science research in medical science research than all of the R&D budgets of private medical companies combined. unless you are talking about extremely large companies, most privately owned companies are too focused by way of the profit motive and quarterly reports, competition, etc. to be able to accumulate large pools of capital, much less be able to direct that capital into research whose payoff will be 10, 20 years down the road, if ever.
perhaps privatization advocates know this and that's why they avoid discussions about it. they're not well known for their strident views on dismantling the university govt science research grant system. you have to pay attention to what they ARE advocating and why. such as private ownership of commodities. extending the scope of private commodity ownership if a far cry from anything to do with technology innovation.
"The only place to spit in a rich man's house is in his face."
--Diogenes of Sinope
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