The government is responsible for economic pathology that makes it very difficult for many families to live in a way that was considered normal in the 1950s and 1960s. From Donald Jeffries at donaldjeffries.substack.com:
Supplemental industries for sale
When I was a boy, an obese boy when obesity wasn’t cool, I never dreamed that one day we would all know the glory of paying for water. I would bring a thermos with ice water to baseball games. For basketball games, I drank out of the gym’s water fountain. I had no idea what was in that non-purified water.
Fluoride was first added to our water supply in 1945. But that was only in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One of the initial proponents of putting this known poison into our drinking water was Harold Hodge, who was part of the human radiation experiments taking place around the same time. You know, where they injected vulnerable “test subjects” with plutonium and uranium. I guess they anticipated something wonderful happening as a result. The “science” behind putting a deadly toxin in our water was provided by some of the largest corporations in the country; Alcoa, the American Petroleum Institute, Dupont, US Steel, among others. And as we learned during the COVID psyop, it is imperative that we all “trust the science.” If we don’t, then we become a “threat to democracy.”
Right-wing “extremists” were understandably upset when fluoridated water went nationwide by the early 1960s. Watch the scene in Dr. Strangelove where these sensible folks were not very subtly skewered. But capitalism- our corrupt, noncompetitive form of capitalism- benefited from this poisoning of the water supply. Two supplemental industries were born; the bottled water industry and the individual water filtration industry. Now, to a simple community college dropout like me, who barely passed high school chemistry, it would seem to make more sense to just have giant water filtration systems in every area, to do what Brita pitchers and the like do. And as for paying for bottles of water, there probably wasn’t a citizen on earth in 1960 that would have believed such a thing could ever become a booming business. They might have had little confidence in the collective intelligence of the people, but paying for water?
The land of the fee and the home of the knave always pays.
What if no one paid the fees?
They have a police force for that.
But, but, but, muh fweedom fwies and hecho en China Lee Greenwood varsity jacket?
Delusions Diehard, welcome to the party pal.