Water began to be sold in single serve bottles in the USA during the 1970s. There always had been a small market for sparkling water and for bottled water in parts of the world where tap water was unsafe or of poor quality. But who would have fathomed that Americans would shell out good money for bottled water when safe, good quality water runs scot-free out of faucets, fountains and coolers?

I am educated in economics and would like to believe I would make the best possible decisions to serve my fellow man. However, if I were a 1970s era socialist government planner, I would not have allowed our economy’s scarce resources to be used to produce and to distribute bottled water. After all, no one would buy it; right?

I would have been dead wrong; consumption now is 1 million bottles per minute.

Today, bottled water is the second largest beverage sold – ahead of both milk and beer. In 2022 Americans spent over $30 billion to buy 16 billion gallons. That pales in comparison to China which consumes nearly 100 billion bottles annually. The world market is over $300 billion and is forecast to hit $500 billion by 2030. Every day, people across the globe consume 1.3 billion plastic bottles, or about 1 million per minute. A Harris poll showed that 94% of Americans buy bottled water. Worldwide, 600 million households (about 2 billion people) drink bottled water. Whew!

All of my economic training, smarts, logic and pristine intentions would have failed dismally in discerning the preferences of my fellow man. I would have completely misjudged the creativity and ambition of entrepreneurs and the behavior of consumers armed with a free choice. Had I been the chief central planner for a socialist government in the 1970s, there would be no bottled water today.

One million bottles of water are consumed every minute!

However, as dead wrong I would have been about bottled water, no one would ever have known of my mistake because it would have been impossible to know what would have happened with free people in free markets.

Of course, it isn’t just about bottled water. There would be no copy machines, personal computers, smart phones, internet or a host of other products we take for granted today. IBM originally estimated the world market for copy machines at 5,000 and for personal computers at 100. The cognoscenti of the time believed the internet would be used only by government and universities.

No socialist government would have produced copy machines or personal computers or facilitated the internet. If perchance they had produced copiers or PCs they would have been shoddy – just like their cars (the Trabant comes to mind) that had less horsepower than today’s riding lawn mowers.

The humble bottle of water, available in any store for around one dollar, shatters the myth, arrogance and fatal conceit underlying socialism and all command economies.

© 2023 George Noga
More Liberty – Less Government, Post Office Box 916381
Longwood, FL 32791-6381, Email: mllg@cfl.rr.com