Comment by amanaplanacanal

I won't disagree with you, but it's a big change.

When European descendants started colonizing that part of the world they treated all the resources as free for the taking. You went into nature, developed some land for agriculture, and it became yours by right. The same with the water. It was essentially homesteading.

So water was treated as property the same way the land was. Whoever used it first, owned it. Leaving out the natives because apparently nobody cared about them, it made sense.

How we fix it now within that legal framework is the question.