A Modest Proposal

It appears that the ongoing drought being experienced in the southeastern section of the U.S. has begun to generate more widespread notice along with the proposals put forth to address the calamity. The facts of the situation are these:
1. The southeast over the past several decades has experienced exponential growth.
2. The infrastructure to support this growth has seriously lagged.
3. The control of the bulk of the infrastructure in the area is assigned to various governmental jurisdictions.
4. Seasonal rainfall which has historically been relied upon to supply adequate water has failed to do so.
As is the case in most all calamities, our society has fallen into the habit of seeking a scape goat to blame for the situation. The evil de jour of anthropogenic climate change is vigorously touted as the culprit by the warmistas who demand that more regulatory authority be ceded to the government in order to control changing climate patterns. Others would assign the responsibility for the crisis on the failure of the various governments to rationally control the recent surge in economic and consequently population growth.

These two schools of thought both favor augmenting the powers of the very entity who is responsible for the situation which is, in the opinion of ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ, the government. As governments are want to do, they generally either ignore the laws of economics or attempt to repeal them. A case in point is the simple fact that water is a commodity and as such is subject to the economic law of supply and demand: the value of a commodity increases to the extent that the demand for it exceeds the supply. The diminishing supply of water accompanied by the increase of demand created by a growing population has not resulted in an increase in the cost of the commodity delivered to the consumers as would be the situation if it were not under the artificial and irrational control of the government. The government's only tool for its purposes is force as exercised by its police powers such as imposing penalties for what it arbitrarily designates as "excessive consumption". The additional enforcement of such ukases generates increases in costs and in no way contributes to the incentive to access more of the commodity.

If the commodity were privately provided widgets and the identical situation existed, the increased value of widgets would generate a private incentive to increase widget deliveries to cover the demand. This basic and simple method of addressing these problems appears to escape the learned discussions of many economically illiterate products of government indoctrination learning centers.

Unfortunately, the above is not satire as was the essay by Mr. Swift.

cross posted at: Eternity Road