If only there were some way of pricing the expense of producing something into the price paid by those who desire it.
In all seriousness, the way the west (and California in particular) price water defies logic. All this talk about senior and junior water rights doesn't make any sense: it only benefits the entrenched incumbents. A properly setup market would simply price out water uses whose utility was materially less than demand of the produced product.
It's a quotation used by the socialist trio of Cabet-Blanc-Marx, and itself has origins in scripture, just with a materialist reframing, instead of a spiritual one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_a...