Groundwater and Other Waters

Even though I haven't taken a single class in geology, ecology, or water policy, I would like to say a few things about water.

I know just as well as any other market anarchist, libertarian, free market conservative and moderate environmentalist that a price mechanism can encourage water conservation. I also believe that, theoretically, water can be the fruit of an individual's labor, and as such it is "fair game" to buy and sell at (almost) whatever price meets the demand for it - otherwise the worker is denied the freedom to determine the conditions of his or her own labor. For that reason, I consider myself an apologist for some kind of "commodification" of water.

That said, I should point out that the above paragraph includes the words "almost" and "some kind of". My support for the commodification of water is very qualified, and is much more qualified than it was, say, a year ago.

First, there's the obvious issue about monopoly. If there is only one water supplier that services a region big enough for people to not be able to move out of without uprooting themselves, then there's a monopoly, and I think that that can meet the necessary condition for institutionalized economic coercion and thus "state-ness". If this monopoly distributes according to a "socialist" model, then prices can be too low to encourage conservation and wise use, as is the case in many places in the U.S. right now; if it distributes according to a capitalist model, as in Chile, then prices can become a burden weighing most heavily on the poor, who wouldn't be (maybe I should say aren't) able to afford a price that their better-coffered neighbors can afford.

Given that water right now is considered a "natural monopoly", I think there's very good reason for libertarians and their comrades to fear water feudalism. Granted, there's that classic line that exorbitant prices can in the absence of government-imposed barriers to entry encourage innovation and competition. All good and true, but not all barriers to entry are government-imposed. Barriers to entry can be imposed through contracts by an entity with a large-enough exclusive service area. The bigger the exclusive service area, the more the terms and conditions resemble legislation (this is why I believe free marketeers should not only be anti-state, but also a little bit anti-capitalist).

Barriers to entry can also result from the "naturally" high overhead that is demanded by the particular kind of field - thus that pernicious phrase "natural monopoly". You need a lot of infrastructure for the kind of service that water consumers demand today, and that requires a lot of capital. For that reason, an already-opperating water provider has a pre-existing advantage over any potential competitor.

For the amount of overhead there is, there's a certain price level where alternative service becomes profitable. Then, there's the price level that people are able to pay. Maybe this is because I'm not an economist, but I can't blindly believe that the two are always going to overlap.

At our point of development, the only feasible alternative to the water monopoly that I imagine is good rain and clean groundwater. People can build their rain gutters to empty out into big bins, or huge tanks, or cisterns. People can dig wells. The house in Hayward that my dad's family lived in when he was a baby had a well in the back yard. It still does. Of course, this would only work if there actually is good rain or clean groundwater. If there's neither of these, then there's only trucks. And the water monopoly.

There's a funny thing about groundwater (and rain water might be part of this). You dig a well in your back yard and put a pump on it, and when you want your weekly sponge bath or you want to water your garden, you take your bucket to your well and pump out a good bucket full. Assuming that the water in the ground is an unowned resource, the water pouring into your bucket was transferred out of the state of nature by your work of pumping your well. Now, how much of your water from your well is yours? All of it? Cause the Coke bottling plant in Kerala was under that presumption, and they were sucking up all the water in the area. People had barely enough water to drink, and not enough to water their fields. And a lot of the water that was left in the ground was contaminated with the sludge that the factory pooped out.

The water table should probably be considered common property - not so much because everyone collectively homesteaded it and bequeathed it to their neighbors and heirs, as Long theorizes about village trails, but because if you fuck up the water table on your land you fuck up the water table for everyone else. When you dump on your land, and it seeps into the water table, it seeps into other peoples water too, and you effectively dumped onto other people's land.

Water isn't exactly like vegetables. I pick some vegetables from my garden, and that doesn't prevent you from picking vegetables from your garden. But when I pump water out of my ground, I am pumping water out of your ground too. If enough people pump out enough water, someone can get a sinkhole.

It looks like for every groundwater user there's a certain amount of groundwater that is good and right to use, and above which the use of groundwater becomes an infringement on someone else's property rights.

Of course, this is all assuming that you actually are entitled to use some of the water in the ground you own. And I say, Why not? Part of property rights is the right to enjoy a thing for its traits that you subjectively value. When you are in the habit of pumping some water from your ground, you are enjoying your property for the water that is in it. If the water table is poisoned, or if it dries up as a result of some human's actions, then the aspects of your property for which you subjectively enjoy it have been damaged, and your right to your property has been infringed.

A quick libertarian response to something like sinkholes is civil liability. Don't need legislation, just sue the ones who use the most water. But ruling someone liable for a sinkhole presupposes that there was some kind of wrongdoing that is commonly acknowledged as wrongdoing. You could point at the bottling plant down the hill, but when you say that they're responsible for the sinkhole you're saying that there's a standard of how much water you can appropriately extract, and that the bottling plant exceeded that amount.

It would be nice to know what this standard is before the sinkhole actually happens. A wholesomely organized society would probably include a mechanism to determine how much groundwater someone may rightfully extract without causing damage or aggravating scarcity. This standard should be able to fluctuate according to the climate. This doesn't necessarily mean rationing by government. If there's technology that allows a government to claim to know how much groundwater you should be allowed to use, then there's technology for voluntarily-composed and voluntarily-funded organizations to do it too.

Once everyone figures out what their rightful share of groundwater is, people can reappropriate it through a market in water shares. (I have no idea if current water law is like this or not.) I just started thinking about this a couple days ago, so I'm not decided on whether the water share should be connected to and inalienable from the land, in which case a landowner can only lease the share out, or if the water share should be considered fully alienable from the land, in which case the land owner can sell it for good. Right now I'm leaning towards the former, so let's go with that for now.

The stint should take into account how much water there is in the surrounding area, and could be expressed in terms of gallons per day per square foot or yard - so that land owners who have more land would be entitled to more water (they theoretically may need more water for what they want to do with their land). If there's a hippy who wants to grow nothing on his land but weed, which doesn't require that much water, he can lease most of his water share to his neighbor who's growing corn, or even - God forbid - to the soda bottling plant.

There is the worry that under water share rent the hippy might charge his neighbor an exorbitantly high groundwater rent, but that fear is nothing compared to the fear that under water share sale a company might buy up all the extra shares in the area and hold title to water on land that other people supposedly own, and then sell back the water itself at exorbitant prices.

There's also the worry that in an urban setting, where there's more people per square foot, individuals will be entitled to less water. This might be a reason to consider expressing the stint in terms of gallons per day per person, rather than gallons per day per square yard. But if the stint is written that way, then as the number of persons in an area increases, the overall size of each share would shrink. So the problem really isn't avoided. Also, in an urban setting, most of the water is probably coming from somewhere else, and urban residents can rent or buy shares from wetter areas.

This isn't an apology for universal water communism, or even universal water social democracy. I don't believe there is a minimum amount of water that every single person is entitled to receive no matter where they live. If there were such a minimum, then some trailer resident in the desert is entitled to water from my wet ground, and is entitled to someone getting that water there for him, regardless of the cost of that effort and regardless of how much of that water evaporated along the way.

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, I think there should be strong incentives to conserve, and I think a price mechanism can offer that incentive, if the rules are right. I am a bit of a deontologist, and I do have a somewhat top-down way of looking at how political norms should be deduced from an a priori conception of individual sovereignty. But coercion itself has to be thought of as the real world experience of having no other choice left, and that necessitates a lot of induction as well as deduction. A straightforward black and white top-down method by itself isn't going to get us a world where everyone has relatively easy access to the means of subsistence and where there are alternatives to having to pay others your dues to live. I'm going to risk sounding like a Friedmonain here, but rules are tools. If the rules don't get you a prosperous, equitable, and sustainable outcome, then change the rules.

Three Strikes & I'll Run Your Arm Over with a Truck

(I should note, that the photographs this title is alluding to actually may have been misinterpretted; however, I think the feelings they evoke are descriptive enough of what I'm trying to get at here.)

I used to think it ridiculously easy to argue against deterrence as the primary basis of punishment. All you have to do (I thought) is show some example of punishment that theoretically may have deterred people but which pretty much all of us consider way out of line.

For example, executing people for stealing cloth. Now, stealing cloth wasn't the only non-lethal capital crime in Britain - others were armed robbery, stealing with the use of a mask or other disguise, and saying something about the King that he didn't like. But for a time in Halifax, cloth was considered so foundational to the economy that the first beheading machine in Britain (probably the first ever) was set up to deter the theft of it.

I expect most people in my place and time to think what I think about this - that proportionality is an integral part of justice, and that ending someone's life radically exceeds the degree of force that was initiated by stealing cloth. But I heard something at work today that makes me fear that this idea isn't all that obvious to people.

One girl was talking about the Three Strikes Law, and about that poor bum who almost served a life sentence for nicking some tools from a truck ("About 3,700 prisoners in the state are serving life for a third strike that was neither violent nor serious, according to the legal definition."). Nicking tools is a stupid crime. People shouldn't have to pay with the rest of their lives for stupid crimes.

Then some dude piped up and said something like "Well if a few years in prison won't deter them from committing the same stupid crimes over and over..." as if now the crime that merits a life sentence is chronic stupidity.

This greatly disheartens me. Just one slip on the ideological banana peel can get a guy who aproves of life sentences for non-violent crimes to also approve of the death penalty for those crimes. And if Three Strikes looks totally normal to some people (in fact, to most California voters - California voters!), then what else can look good and right to them?

Paying the Price

Tomorrow afternoon some childhood friends of mine will be giving away free ice cream at the Rivermark Plaza, in memory of one of their military friends who got killed in a foreign country. He allegedly died "defending our freedom". I got invited to it on facebook, and I ignored the invitation.

I do have a good reason not to go. Tomorrow afternoon, if things work right, I'll be hiking with a friend of mine. But even if I were sticking around here, I would still not go to give out or receive free ice cream (even if it were vegan).

Don't get me wrong - early death is a tragedy. It always is a tragedy. But my childhood friends are making this into something more significant than a tragedy. They're making their friend into a demi-god who paid a steep price for them, and whose death they are somehow benefitting from in some profound way.

I do believe there are things that can really be called sacrifice or martyrdom, but those terms are so often misused. Very often martyrdom means "killed while murdering". I'm not calling all U.S. soldiers murderers, so I'm not going to conflate conservatives' use of "sacrifice" and "pay for our freedom" with the way Islamists and Iranian nationalists use the word "martyrdom".

Another way to misuse "sacrifice" and "martyrdom" is to slap them nondiscriminately onto just any murder that wasn't in cold blood. That's how the victims of democide, genocide, and persecution get turned into sacrificial lambs. (And the sacrificial lambs didn't die for any good reason, either.) Jesus didn't make some profound sacrifice for mankind. He was just murdered. The only thing he paid the price for was imperialism.

If the young deceased wasn't killed while murdering, and if his death wasn't an accident, then chances are he was just murdered. My friends' friend didn't die fighting for freedom. He just died. That's all.

Ice cream was his favorite comfort food. Everyone knew it, and he knew everyone knew it. When he saw one of his friends being distraught, he would offer to go get them some ice cream. And that's why my friends are going to hand out ice cream. It would have been good enough if they were doing it just to celebrate the life of a friend who died too early. But no, he was in uniform when he died, so now people have to read some value into his death, and make believe that he actually died for a cause.

Kafir Beard

I didn't want to post this on facebook, and I didn't want to make a video out of it, and I didn't want to post it on myspace either, so I'm posting this here. I apologize to those of you who were expecting to see some profound anarchist legal theory.

It is said that when Muhammad received visitors from some king from the east (maybe the Persian Emporer, who was Zoroastrian, or maybe some Hindu raja), he was disgusted at the shortness of their beards and the length of their mustaches. He cried out something like: "Why do you do that to your faces?" To which they said something like: "Our master commands us to grow out our mustaches and cut short our beards." The prophet's response was something like: "My Master commands me to grow out my beard and cut short my mustache!"

Besides our recent day of scribble protest (for which I made something that I hope was both unoffensive and indicative of an interest in and appreciation for Muslim heritage), I thought people can do some kinds of fashion protests that showed they are knowledgable of, tolerant of, and "disinclined to acquiesce" to radical Muslim aesthetics.

Enter the Kafir beard. In short, it's a stubble beard, with a walrus, bar handle, or Fu Man Chu mustache. Give yourself enough time next year to grow one out for May 20th. Those of you whose faces aren't as blessed as others' might have to start growing your mustaches out as early as New Year's, or even earlier. And, needless to say, not everyone will be able to engage in this kind of protest.

Now, there are a couple drawbacks to this. One is that probably very few people would notice it as a reversal of the fistlength Muslim beard. You would have to couple it with something else, like maybe a t-shirt or a pin button that has an arrow pointing up and the words "Kafir Beard".

The other drawback is that while a few loud and angry Muslims considered it obligatory for everyone to refrain from depicting Muhammad, and believed that it was anti-Islamic for anyone to even draw a picture of Muhammad in good fun, almost all Muslims recognize the beard as an obligation only for Muslim men. We haven't really heard of non-muslim American men getting death threats for shaving. Or at least, I haven't. Maybe some men in America have received such threats. But a backlash over non-Muslims shaving just isn't part of the image of a radical Muslim. Someone please correct me if it is.

But anyway, this beard is just an idea. I might try it myself, I don't know. I might have to invest in some mustache wax. And, if you do try this yourself, dear reader, do dress well while you're at it. You'll want to balance out all the negative energy attracted by bristles that remind haters of child rapists and what not.

Thoreau and Lapin

I'm not going to be as analytical in this post as I would like to be, partly because I don't know how I would be able to explicate my thoughts about this without sounding like an economist. There seem to be two different attitudes within the libertarian/libertarian-isch ways of thinking about personal independence which sort of rub against each other.

First, there's the "rugged individual"ism of Henry David Thoreau, which most of us know is expressed in his more famous book, but which I think is put clearest in his lecture "Life Without Principle". To be honest, this is the attitude that my own sentiment accords better with.

[9] The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work...Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

[11] The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business...

[12] Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage...

Then, there's this other attitude, as expressed here by Daniel Lapin.

Does God want us to be rich?...To tell you the truth, I can't say with any certainty on that subject. However I do know that God does want us to be obsessively preoccupied with the needs and desires of other people, whether they're your clients or your customers, whether they're your vendors or your employees. Be obsessively preoccupied with the needs of other people. And it shouldn't suprise anybody who believes in a loving deity that the result of that is the great blessing of prosperity and wealth. Surely the ultimate way to acheive prosperity - become obsessively preoccupied with the needs of other people.

Do not insist on making buggy whips while Henry Ford is building a car down the road. Because now you're not focused on what other people need or want - you're focused on what you want to do...[P]eople sometimes say to you "The important thing in life is to find a job that you really love. Go and work in an area that you've really got passion for." Wrong. Sounds very nice, but it's wrong! It's wrong because it's selfish. What it's saying is "I want to make a living doing what I like doing!" You're missing the point. This isn't about the money, it's about your relationship with other people. You've got to find what other people need and want and then learn how to get passionate about supplying it.