All around the world, and right here in the United States too, people are facing severe water shortages. Yet, at the same time, there are special water bars being set up around the USA that sell super luxury water.
What’s luxury water? It’s water. Of course, it’s not just any water. It’s water that is sold at an extremely high price. One company sells bottles of its water at the price of 40 dollars for a 750 milliliter bottle. Thats 5 cents per millileter… of water.
Is it especially pure water? Perhaps, but at most grocery stores, a gallon of distilled water, the purest water a person can get, is sold for under one dollar.
This designer water is being sold at such a high price, not really because it is of superior quality, but rather because it allows the people who drink it to make a social statement: That they have enough money to drink water that costs 40 dollars per bottle.
The company that sells the 40 dollar per bottle water explains that their brand is “strategically positioned to target the expanding super-luxury consumer market. It’s couture water that makes an announcement like a Rolls Royce.”
Right wing economic theory calls this sort of thing a manifestation of the inherent wisdom of a free market. Progressives call it wasteful, pretentious and profoundly unwise.
It’s not that progressives want to make it illegal to for people to spend their money on gaudy things like 40 dollar bottles of water. However, progressives do hold to a high code of economic morality: When some people are struggling to get any water to drink at all, it is an ugly and immoral act to spend 40 dollars for a bottle of water.
Put a right winger in the White House, and you’ll have a President who celebrates wasteful extravagance. Put a progressive in the White House, and you’ll have a President who urges people to think about the moral dimensions of how they spend their money.
(Source: blingh2o.com)
You would have to be really stupid or belong to Hollywood (not exactly a right-wing part of town). Penn & Teller did a segment on their show where they created a H2O list and filled glasses with a tap water hose. Very funny.
I agree its wasteful and pretentious, but I imagine the President’s day should be spent on more urgent national issues, and not worrying about what Paris Hilton drinks.