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.