"Right" is a word made for arguing about. Let's forget the word "right".
Clean water and sanitation are pretty much the two things which most enable us to maintain population-dense cities. Lack of modern sanitation repeatedly led to horrific pandemics in the Middle Ages in Europe, culminating in the Black Death. I don't have any statistics handy, but one would expect the presence of sanitation to be as big a contribution to personal health as diet, and what's more, poor sanitation is sure to harm other people through disease transmission.
So yes, I believe that clean water and sanitation are very important to human life at scale; important enough that we should pay a sufficient tax, so that we can give them to people who can't afford to pay.
important enough that we should pay a sufficient tax, so that we can give them to people who can't afford to pay.
The solution, then, is to bail out the corrupt and wasteful government?
I'm not seeing any meaningful way in which this differs from bailing out banks or auto manufacturers. I'm assuming that you agree that those gifts to corporate America were immoral. If you agree about the corporate bailouts, how would this governmental bailout differ?
I was offering a response to the parent, who was asking whether we should pay for sanitation -- not to the situation in the article. I don't know what the right solution to Birmingham's problems is, and I've never even been to Birmingham, so I'm in no position to speculate. However, if and when the local government is capable of functioning well enough to achieve things using money, then working water and sewers should be high on its list.
I don't know if bailing out the "corrupt and wasteful government" is the solution but I think it is meaningfully different.
The difference that immediately springs to mind is that the corruption was in some ways the responsibility of higher levels of government to prevent. The justice system was failing these residents when people engaged in corrupt practices were not caught soon enough to prevent this situation arising. It is difficult to hold the residents who voted fully accountable - they can not be clairvoyant and predict who is or is not corrupt.
Another difference is that governments exist to serve the peoples' interest at all levels, if one level is dysfunctional it does not seem to give all other levels the freedom to ignore it. Giving the reality on the ground right now it is the governments duty to do some kind of cost-benefit analysis to determine what can be done to help these people a great deal while only harming (or perhaps helping) others in other jurisdictions a small amount. (For example based on the information in the article it would seem obvious that sanitation problems among the poor are going to end up being bigger medicare bills for the government to handle at some point given the economic circumstances.)
Clean water and sanitation are pretty much the two things which most enable us to maintain population-dense cities. Lack of modern sanitation repeatedly led to horrific pandemics in the Middle Ages in Europe, culminating in the Black Death. I don't have any statistics handy, but one would expect the presence of sanitation to be as big a contribution to personal health as diet, and what's more, poor sanitation is sure to harm other people through disease transmission.
So yes, I believe that clean water and sanitation are very important to human life at scale; important enough that we should pay a sufficient tax, so that we can give them to people who can't afford to pay.