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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a market failure caused by using the government to meter water. In this case, the 'selfish' method would work better.

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.

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The government can meter stuff at market rates too.

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.

Clearly there is something else at play stopping the market price from emerging, otherwise one of the in-towners could just resell the water to the excluded persons from their supply at a profit. I'm guessing they've made this illegal, though, since it's such an obvious solution of a win-win to a quick buck to a local that wasn't used. At the very least there is always a crackhead who needs $20 for a hit, I don't see how you can get the whole town to collude out of spite, it's just completely infeasible unless the people buying are like notorious child snatchers or something.

> 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.

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?

It takes 100+ gallons of water to grow a pound of alfalfa.

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.

Alfalfa was a placeholder for illustration, not the only possible concern. Do you really think there's no world where the meagre funds of individuals can't ever exceed profitable use? Not to mention you completely neglected to address my other examples.

I want to see you dying of thirst one day with no money while I have all the water (for 1 million dollars a gallon of course) and when you ask for a drink I will say

""there is no such thing as a "shortage.""

Free market religion followers are crazy lol

How is being able to buy water for $1M worse than not being able to buy it at all?

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