A natural monopoly is a monopoly that exists because the cost of producing the product (i.e., a good or a service) is lower due to economies of scale if there is just a single producer than if there are several competing producers. The most commonly cited examples of natural monopolies are utilities such as railroads, pipelines, electric power transmission systems and water supply systems. Such industries are characterized by very large costs for their infrastructure (i.e., which are fixed costs), and it is thus often inefficient (i.e., detrimental to the economy as a whole) to have more than a single firm in a region because of the high cost of duplicating the facilities (e.g., parallel pipelines or parallel sets of electric wires to every home and business).

What ownership, governance, and institutional arrangements and funding responsibilities are required to ensure the effective, efficient, and sustainable provision of public infrastructure services

Note the use of the words “public infrastructure” in that sentence. It seems a very long bow to draw that Shand and the Commissioners would somehow be able to consider full privatisation as aligned with the goals of public infrastructure services. In fact, it would probably require that you put ideology ahead of a literal reading of the ToR – which was my original point.

For in a predatory regime, nothing is done for public reasons. Indeed, the men in charge do not recognize that “public purposes’ exist. They have friends, and enemies, and as for the rest—we’re the prey.

There’s no benefit that will come out of privatising water – it is transparent and cynical predation at its worst.

You may not be (in fact probably are not) aware that the silliness of privatising water was tried in La Paz quite recently, the unhappy dehydrated types took to the streets intent on minimising the privatisers happiness.

Poor old Ayn and her objectivist acolytes never quite got the cause and effect cycle, karma, yin / yang or that type of thing. My rule is simpler, if it pisses somebody off expect fireworks.

“Today, the signature of modern capitalism neither benign competition, nor class struggle, nor an inclusive middle-class utopia. Instead, predation has become the dominant feature – a system wherein the rich have come to feast on the decaying systems built for the middle class.

“The predatory class is not the whole of the wealthy; it may be opposed by many others of similar wealth. But it is the defining feature, the leading force. And its agents are in full control of the government under which we live.”

- J.K. Galbraith