patrick.net

LOL! It's just like the town/city water and sewer system. When it was introduced half a century ago, town/city water and sewer system was promoted as a far less expensive alternative to private wells and septic tanks. Now, after a couple generations of bureaucrats, the public water and sewer system not only has to pay for current workers but also the retirement and benefits of retired workers, not only the initial installation cost but also the much much higher cost of maintenance and repairs (and other layers of bureaucrats restricting what can be done thereby further raising cost). Nowadays, water/sewer bills from a town or city centralized system can easily run multiple hundreds of dollars for a house, whereas pumping the septic costs only a few hundred dollars once several years (working out to be $10/mo or less).

That's before further layers of monopoly laid on top of it: such as if a bank convinces your town managers to install a water/sewer system costing tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh, if they don't, the bankers will buy off enough health department / EPA regulators and lawmakers to make sure that the water standards are so high that your town will have to spend that much money on a water system that you can drink without boiling even if most of that water is used for flushing toilet . . . just to make sure you will pay multiple hundreds of dollars every month to stay in your own house! And that's not even property tax (i.e. land rent paid to government).