If you don't trust government for the "trivial" stuff, why trust them for important things?

This letter was printed in today's Ottawa Citizen about the United Church of Canada making some sort of pronouncement last week opposing the privatization of water and even the selling of bottled water.

Environmental pressure groups see churches as 'soft targets' that can be easily duped into helping spread their anti-capitalist, anti-technology, anti-pretty-much-everything-about-the-modern-world message. While I am myself agnostic on a good day, I am sorry for my family that their donations apparently helped support such nonsense.

According to the example of practically every single resource, product, and service humans consume, the best way to protect our supply of water and the environment is through markets and private property rights. The city of Ottawa recently discovered that about one fifth of all the potable water it produces, 65 million litres a day, is lost to leaky pipes! If someone actually owned those pipes and had to pay for the water flowing through them there would be a strong incentive to prevent that.

If water is too essential to let anyone profit from, surely the same applies to food? By this reasoning we should eliminate all private farms, supermarkets, and restaurants. Of course that's been tried, in the Soviet Union. Millions died.