Nobody's preventing you from going and finding your own water source either. The government is too much of a nanny state for putting flouride in water for public health, but it's just fine for providing water to you in the first place?
Where do you live where you can collect rain at a quantity that would allow you to forgo central water?
I’m not talking about having a barrel. Most states don’t care about that quantity. I’m talking about storing on the order of 10k gallons. A rain barrel is nothing. An average family in the USA uses hundreds of gallons a day. It doesn’t rain daily so you’d need thousands of gallons. Most states do not allow this, nor is it actually feasible for everyone to do this due to space constraints, which is why it’s generally not allowed.
Which state is this? Some states such as Massachusetts and Maine, will allow you to have a well, but then you cannot have central water. Thus, the dichotomy is irrelevant since it's not like someone actually has a choose, since it's done on the municipal level.
In fact, generally the places in Connecticut, and New England that have well water are because they specifically cannot have the other.
I don't know much about western USA, but I suspect it's similar.
You're being actively misleading. Like on a scale of normal people to politicians to liars you're at least in the politicians range.
The only states with restrictive surface water policies, generally, are the western ones, because every drop of water is allocated according to interstate agreements and letting peasants take what falls on their land is like the toddler version of letting privateers crap on a treaty.
In New England and the east generally, you can either have a well or municipal water, not both, because they don't want to worry about back flows and contamination of the municipal water supply, etc. It's not the big deal you're making it out to be.
> In New England and the east generally, you can either have a well or municipal water, not both, because they don't want to worry about back flows and contamination of the municipal water supply, etc. It's not the big deal you're making it out to be.
this just isn't true. Can you have private well water in Boston, Hartford or Portsmouth? The answer is no. In general in the northeast, those who have well water have it explicitly because they're not served by the municipality. Feel free to give counter examples with specific cities or towns that serve both and actively let you switch between both for a given address that supports both.
There are some towns in New Hampshire for example where the town has municipal water but a given house does not (it has well water), but usually that’s due to specific characteristics of the lot that forbid it from having a municipal without a large cost, so the developer sets up well water instead.
What you're saying doesn't even make sense - municipal water is routed to a treatment plant, so it wouldn't matter anyway.
> Most states do not allow this, nor is it actually feasible for everyone to do this due to space constraints, which is why it’s generally not allowed.
You are getting into something there. You understand the necessity of municipal water collection mandates due to space constraints, but when it comes to public health (e.g vaccines) or public dental health (e.g fluoride in water), that's beyond comprehension and an infringement on your right (to have bad teeth)?
Also, in the real world, most (emphasis on most) states don't have any restrictions on collecting rainwater, and some actively encourage people to do so.
That's not true in general especially if you weight it with population in mind, such as the wet states of NJ, PA, MD etc. that have more population; though there are areas where the states have passed laws concerning water rights where it is true(CO, WY).
Nobody is preventing the citizens from digging their own well and ensuring their own water supply and having bad teeth.
I like it how when it comes to fluoride in water, that's the nanny state pushing things on people, but when it comes to municipal water, said people can't bother to use their freedom and get their own water supply. It's the same that parents refuse to vaccinate their children for measles and then hurry to the doctors when the child inevitably gets sick. The freedom to die of preventable diseases is a great thing!
You can also remove fluoride from your own water if you want to. Although I don't know if there are any filters that can distinguish between naturally occurring fluoride (ok) and fluoride added by the government (evil).
This requires a Reverse-Osmosis filter which is super expensive. So if you really want to give fluoride, I'd be happy for the government to hand out free sodium fluoride tabs for whoever wants it, in exchange to not force the water to have fluoride by default. See, we get the best of both worlds?
How much of your water treatment do you want to do yourself? I assume you don’t want the ‘government’ to send you completely untreated water. So what is the problem with fluoridation as compared to all the other uncontroversial ways in which your tap water has been treated? All kinds of stuff gets added to and removed from the water.
Also, there are simple (and cheap) water filters that are quite effective at removing fluoride. As fluoride is often naturally present in water anyway, it is only really necessary to remove the majority of the added fluoride to get the water back into a ‘natural’ state.
The issue is that putting fluoride in the water isn't really "treating" the water. It's in essence acting a medication (see my paragraph below for a justification of this), to the benefit of people's teeth. As far as I know, every other chemical added / removed from the water is done for the purpose of the taste of the water, protecting the pipes which serve the water, or disinfecting the water. In this way, it's different from all the other chemicals, and there is also some limited opposition to other chemicals (e.g. debate on the use of UV / chlorine / ozone).
As for a loose argument for why fluoride in water is medicinal: the FDA classifies toothpaste as a cosmetic and also potentially a drug (depending on whether it contains fluoride and the claims the product makes):
> Ingredients that cause a product to be considered a drug because they have a well-known (to the public and industry) therapeutic use. An example is fluoride in toothpaste.
> Some products meet the definitions of both cosmetics and drugs. [...] Among other cosmetic/drug combinations are toothpastes with claims to freshen breath and cleanse the teeth that contain fluoride.
[Both quotes are from https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetics-laws-regulations/it-...]
