There's more checks in place to assure that your government water is handled appropriately. A corporation will sell you anything and then declare bankruptcy to let the owners profit off the fraud.
A government can inefficiently check over and over again that the supply it is providing is pure. A corporation is only beholding to its shareholders, where inefficiency is always a negative, regardless of its positive externalities.
How could anyone know if the for-profit corporation selling them water is competent?
If a bottled water company decided they could save a tiny amount switching to a plastic type that was legal but might give you cancer in 10 years, do you trust them not to do that?
Anyone making that decision is thinking short term. By the time the harm becomes public they've enriched themselves and left.
Government is less likely to knowingly poison you, and is probably about equally likely to unknowingly poison you.
Is anyone involved in the Flint, MI crisis in prison right now?
Private companies are not immune from consequences.
I agree that it's still possible to be poisoned by bottled water, but there are a greater number of incentives in place to lessen the likelihood of it happening.
The problem is that it's the job of the government to ensure that private companies meet their consequences.
So, if you cannot trust government, you cannot trust private companies to not poison you either. I guess it's possible to have governments break down just enough to screw up the local water supply while not quite rolling in the bed with multinational companies yet, but I doubt such an arrangement would be stable for long.
Isn't it what happened after a river contamination/Chemical spill scandal in WV?
The company declared bankruptcy rather than pay the cleanup bills, but the owner and executives just started a new one, hired the same management, and everything is fine (for them), since taxpayers paid for the cleanup?
I think the name of the company was "Freedom Industries", which makes it even more of a typical american "urban legend", but it is actually true.
[edit] just looked it up, its called "Elk river cheminal spill" on wikipedia, and the exec actually used the same address and the same phone number to set up Lexycon LLC, the new company: they know they'll get away, they don't care to hide anymore.
Market consequences for something like drinking water is such a wild concept. Forget lead, imagine how many can get dysentery before the bottled water business stops blaming random local Chinese restaurants the consumer went to the day before.
If you're concerned about this kind of thing, the only rational way to go about it is to test your water regularly (whether you drink from the tap or buy it bottled). Everything else is basically putting your trust in a bunch of random people whom you don't really know.
> How could anyone know if their state government is competent?
One way of knowing would be that you can see trustworthy water testing. That there are consequences (political, legal) for public officials when there is wrongdoing. That society seems to function.
How would you know a company bottling water isn't incompetent?
That's an oxymoron. You might temporarily have competent individuals in government, but the organization as a whole is not incentivized for competence.
Same goes for corporations, especially bigger ones.
The water authority in every county I have ever lived publish annual water reports with extensive information about water sources, quality, and composition results.
To be fair, most of the time they're correct - at least as far as US tap water goes. Events like this are remembered because they are remarkable, not because they are normal.
Is that because we assume that bottled water has more rigorous testing or ... ? Because seems like a failure at the top could cause just the same issues.
