Anarchism and Water

I am relatively new to minarchism/libertarianism whatever, but the more I find myself argueing in favor of libertarian type government the more I find myself actually leaning towards Anarchism..I still have a lot of learning to do but I can defenitaly see a transformation.

Anyways, one of the things my friends bring up most is the 'water supply', and how that would be aweful privately owned, etc. I dont know much about how that would work but from my initial thoughts it would be much like everything else where there would be competing businesses and everything, but I am usually pretty stumped when they bring it up, primarily because my lack of knowledge. Could someone help me out? Any Links?

How would it be awful? Is the food you buy at the store awful because it is privately owned? How about the bottled water that so many people buy?

I'm not going to get into the details of it, but if worse comes to worse just mention that the water supply and anything else some people get antsy over can be controlled by a consumer coop, another form of voluntary organisation on the market. So there's no need for a "state" even in the worst case.

Some remarks by Rothbard: http://mises.org/story/2553

I know how you feel, food and water economics still irk me as they remain one of the few barriers to a free society.

MatthewWilliam:

Some remarks by Rothbard: http://mises.org/story/2553

I know how you feel, food and water economics still irk me as they remain one of the few barriers to a free society.

Scarcity in general makes that hard to do, especially when there is added artificial scarcity foisted upon society by state monopolization, illegalizing the morally preferable use of the market to address scarcity, & forcing others to utilize more political (coercive) means.

The replicator could be invented tomarow, & no one would know about until the inventor wounded up dead on his bathroom floor, & the state eventually rolls out "limited" access to replicator technology, thus continuing artifical dependance upon the state for basic needs that would otherwise allow for stateless life to be more economically viable.

Although, chances are, this replicator technology would be open-sourced to an extent, if not totally, for the sake of it's importance in addressing scarcity.  If that were to happen, then indeed: economics would change forever.