How watering your lawn is leading to a police state.....

Rex Curry

As a lawyer, I am asked to fight laws that micromanage lawn-watering. Watering laws blame individuals for overuse caused by water bureaucracies. The government employs police-state tactics including surveillance patrols, citations, fines, judicial proceedings and even criminal charges.

“Government Water Supply” bureaucracies produce water shortages in the same way the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics produced food shortages. If bureaucrats were any stupider they would have to be watered weekly.

Every “Government Water Supply” would create the same shortages, rationing and tyrannical tactics if it became the "Government Water, Food, Clothing and Shelter Supply."

It is fortunate that food is a free market compared to water, or the Soviets could have broadcast pictures of Americans standing in line for food rations. Instead, the Soviets could have broadcast water rationing and police patrols, and private lakes and wells being emptied by government bureaucracies.

Government rationing leaves extra water for wasteful uses while defeating profit incentives to develop other sources and solutions.

People who altruistically conserve and who support watering restrictions are chumps who promote waste by naively propping up the government's non-market pricing.

If the media want to solve water shortages, then they should advocate privatization of all water sources and distribution. Then our wealth of water will equal that of our food, clothing and shelter, without soggy socialism, Soviet-style rationing and the police state.

One of the biggest, most economical water systems evolved from a company founded in 1782 by the Perrier brothers that supplied piped water in Paris.

Steven Hanke, a former senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, who has made a study of private water systems, states, "The success of the Parisian system can be laid squarely at the feet of private ownership and regulation through competition, rather than public regulatory bodies."

Capitalism provides the means to build cisterns, drip irrigation systems, better commodes and showerheads, automatic faucets and other solutions. Capitalism's desalination technology and waste-water recycling technology will eventually circumvent the problems caused by government ownership and control of water.

Meanwhile environmentalists lengthen shortages and delay innovation by using conservation to hide the true cost of water and by diverting time and money to government and self-defeating programs.

Bureaucratic efforts to encourage greater water conservation and regulation will achieve the opposite of that intended.

People should not altruistically conserve water, and the media should not encourage the practice.

Altruistic water conservation in a non-market system helps wasteful people evade the true cost of wastefulness and it discourages use and development of alternatives, which would eventually reduce the price of water. Perpetuating the present non-market approaches will cause greater shortages and higher water prices.

People who altruistically conserve water and who support watering restrictions are suckers who promote waste by naively propping up the government's pricing system, which would otherwise be levied in market prices among private firms just like other goods. Watering restrictions are another regulatory response to overuse of water caused by the government's own bureaucratic water fees, which are not market prices (that would rise during shortages or drought, based on supply and demand).

As Liberty lovers say, "Water is too precious to have the government involved."

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Rex Curry is published worldwide as a libertarian and a lawyer with a degree in journalism. http://RexCurry.net is the only site on the internet that collects and displays historic photographs of the original Pledge of Allegiance. Rex collects historic photos that show how socialism has harmed the U.S., and his hobby is also photography and graphic art, displayed on the website. His predecessors helped settle Key West back when Florida's government was virtually non-existent. The Curry Mansion (historic home of Florida's first capitalist millionaire) is still on the local tour.

Rexy@ij.net