Sunday, April 19, 2015

The California Drought and the Free Market

By Michael L. Grable

A long story in The Desert Sun (a Palm Springs daily) recently manufactured a lake out of a puddle in California's perennial water problems.  Maybe it's just Governor Moonbeam's gang feeding propaganda to the fourth estate, but it's a good example of how government regulation and media indoctrination so often contrive to strain at capitalist gnats and swallow collectivist camels.
  
The story's complicated (like everything concerning California water), but it's basically about the Morongo Band of Mission Indians selling its Millard-Canyon water rights to NestlĂ© S.A., a Swiss food and beverage giant which annually bottles about 200 million gallons of the Band's water as Arrowhead 100% Pure Mountain Water.  Although that sounds like a lot of water, it's only about the amount 400 homes or a single golf course would annually use.

Anyway, the Cabazon Water District, the State of California, and maybe even the federal government are trying to muscle a sovereign nation (the Morongo Band) out of its right to sell its water to a private company (NestlĂ©), which, after all, only processes the stuff for its highest and best use – drinking. 

Meanwhile, Governor Moonbeam's gang has dumped one-third of a trillion gallons of California mountain water into the Pacific Ocean in its ecological crusade to "save" a two-inch smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.  That sounds like a lot of water, too, and it is – enough, apparently, to service the annual needs of 666,400 homes or 1,666 golf courses.

So – unless my arithmetic fails me – Californians donating their California water for delta smelts to swim in is 1,666 times more critical than the Morongo Indians selling their California water for Californians to drink.  This seems a perverse priority in the midst of an historic California drought.  After all, Californians don't drink delta smelts.  Neither do Californians flush their toilets with delta smelts, nor bathe in delta smelts, nor water their lawns with delta smelts, nor wash their dishes, clothes, or cars with delta smelts.  In fact, Californians don't do anything with delta smelts.  The same goes for vernal pool fairy shrimp, Santa Cruz long-toed salamanders, Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frogs, Colorado pikeminnows, unarmored three spine sticklebacks, desert pupfish, tidewater gobies, and Modoc suckers.  So why would parched Californians prefer the water needs of delta smelts over the water needs of 666,400 California home owners or 1,666 California golf courses and their patrons? 


That's not to mention Californians having demolished 29 of their statewide dams during the last two decades.  Why would drought-prone Californians squander two decades of their winter rains and snows, which they could otherwise have collected as freshwater in the reservoirs behind the dozens of their dams they demolished?

The short answer in both cases is California's governing moonbeamery.  Rachel Carsonism and Sierra Clubism may not directly send too many voters to the polls, but they both spend mountains of money to indirectly influence the cultural climate and the political process.  In no other state has environmental and ecological evangelism succeeded more in distorting free-market decision-making.  And, like every other instance of Left-Coast liberal lunacy, the market distortion eventually spreads eastward to academically, journalistically, and politically infect national decision-making.

Forty million Californians live in a Mediterranean clime, which, without intervention, probably couldn't readily support the water needs of even one fourth as many Californians.  For example, Chile – another of the only six Mediterranean climes on earth – has fewer than half as many people as California living in an area almost twice as big as California.  Moreover, most of California's present water-management and distribution system was initially planned almost half a century ago.  

So what's next for parched Californians – besides a $100-billion bullet train (through uprooted almond groves) to nowhere; several millions more thirsty displaced persons from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras; and an avalanche of new regulators and regulations to effect Governor Moonbeam's 25% water-use reduction order?

In addition to fewer flushes; fewer baths; fewer lawns; fewer golf courses; and fewer dish, clothes, and car washes, the next California crusade will be for fewer steaks, fewer chops, and fewer cheeseburgers.  When Friends of the River and For the Sake of the Salmon meet Farm Sanctuary and Mercy for Animals, Governor Moonbeam and his gang will likely be coming next for Californians' meat.

No comments: