Water provision is a natural monopoly. If you hand over natural monopolies to the private sector they raise prices and cut costs as much as the regulators will allow them to and pocket the difference as profit.<p>State monopolies are often intentionally neglected or damaged by bought out politicians as a way to make privatization and the subsequent profit extraction more palatable to a suspicious public. That&#x27;s also where all this &quot;free markets sure are great&quot; propaganda comes from.<p>This is a similar process to what Russia went through in the 90s. They were encouraged to embrace the free market by Harvard &quot;economists&quot; (free market priests) like Larry Summers. They were told that this process would lead to a new age of prosperity for Russia. It didn&#x27;t.<p>The net result was to haemorrhage their economy and enabled the oligarchs to walk off with billions of dollars in state assets at knock down prices.