Yea, this is what happens when the hyper-individualistic "everyone for themselves!" becomes the prevailing attitude. Selfishness becomes a structural weakness for the whole community.
In a free market, the price of water rises so that there is no such thing as a "shortage." It would be uneconomical to waste water on lawns far before a significant amount of additional people would be unable to buy enough to drink. This is why you'll never find the gas station runs out of bottled water because a nearby farmer used it to water his strawberries, despite the selfish/greed factor of the bottled water industry being off the charts.
Though, there also seems to be a lot of spite here, which the market may not be able to solve. Seems like the folks buying bulk water were paying FAR more, to the point that they were using less than 1% of the supply, but paying 15% of the cost. In a pure market, they would be the last cut off, yet they were the first.
""there is no such thing as a "shortage.""
Free market religion followers are crazy lol
What happens when growing alfalfa makes more of a profit than individuals have, such that individuals simply cannot buy water to drink? Or what if a company comes in with sufficient capital to corner the market, then bottles and sells the water at a profit to individuals, exporting the leftover to sell to individuals in other places?
Or what if some random billionaire decides he's mad at his neighbors for voting wrong and decides to buy out all the water for a huge swimming pool that only he gets to use?
Alfalfa value top out at something like $0.50 a pound for the very best stuff.
So your theory is what, that if alfalfa farmers are willing to take no profits at all they could potentially bid water up to 0.5 cents per gallon?
You are so incredibly grossly underestimating the cost and impracticality of bidding water up as high as you're imagining, it is mind boggling.
They can easily bid water high enough to make it commercially useless for many industries, outbidding it from access to human consumption would require mind-boggling amounts of money.