Comment by 0_____0
Comment by 0_____0 4 days ago
Sounds like a resource that isn't appropriately priced
Comment by 0_____0 4 days ago
Sounds like a resource that isn't appropriately priced
Water rights in the western US are mercenary. There's a healthy market in prior appropriation rights.
Just because people don't like what the water is used for doesn't mean the water isn't priced appropriately. You'll still get farmers growing thirsty / pricey crops in the desert if it covers the cost of irrigation.
in capitalism, prices are literally how rationing happens. the theory is that it distributes the resources to those who can make them most productive. here, theoretically the water will be used more productively by chipmakers than by farmers, so the chipmakers will be able to out-bid the farmers and the water will be allocated to them. this is the "invisible hand" of the free market.
No, rationing is the complete opposite and ensures that not just rich people can have access to a resource.
This is basically why the word "rationing" exists in the first place.
What good is being "productive" (whatever your definition of it) if poor people die from lack of access to water because chips need to exist.
We aren't talking about drinking-water quantities of water here but about irrigation quantities. Poor people in Arizona are not in danger of dying from thirst. Think Milagro Beanfield War, not Dune. Poor people in Phoenix get their water from the water utility, which gives you 3740+ gallons of potable water per month for US$4.64: https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservicessite/Documents/Rates_Ef...
That works out to 0.032¢ per liter. A quarter (25¢) will buy you 760 liters of water, enough to survive for three months. That's about 1000× lower than a price at which even Phoenix's homeless might start dying of thirst due to the cost of water. (Homeless people don't pay the water utility, but they get water from people who do.)
Poor people in the country get their water from wells, which cost money to drill but basically nothing to pump more water from.
Rationing might be a reasonable thing to do to keep the aquifer from being depleted, but it would be likely to hit poor people much harder than rich people, because poor people don't have the political influence to prevent the enactment of regulations that would hurt them badly, such as a requirement for an environmental review before drilling a new drinking-water well.
Rationing could cause poor people to die from lack of access to water. Markets won't, unless you're talking about something like a Mars colony.
They sold land rights to the Saudis who then siphoned off the water (now revoked said rights).
"[The Saudis] used sprinklers to grow alfalfa in La Paz County and exports it to feed dairy cattle in Saudi Arabia. The company did not pay for the water it used under the old agreement."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-arabia-water-access-arizo...