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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

This is an extremely frustrating angle to take because what you're implying is that anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose. Now I don't like water going to Golf courses either but to me even the intermediate solution is to price water accurately.

Barring that, long term we're surrounded by 70% body of water with infinite energy beaming down on us, this feels like a solvable problem without having large swaths of the country fight over scraps.

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> anytime anyone comes up with any system that takes water they should go in front of a panel of experts (seniors) who get to decide whether their water usage is for an "approvable" purpose.

This is absolutely how things work, the water for farming and industry is cheap by design (at least in the US) so that people will have relatively cheap food and consumer goods.

Now you can absolutely try to go change that to a strictly capitalist "One gallon of water is 1 cent, whatever the usage", but you'll have a hard time finding a political group in this country that stands behind such a principal. Even the most conservative groups typically back farming subsidies.

I think that’s fine, having an extremely small group of subsidized industries because of historical reasons are fine.

Going forward, I don’t expect any group of experts appointed by the government to know whether a use case is justified and being right. Chaos theory abounds and the second part of my post applies.

As the AI/Robotics genie emerges and who gets to feed the AI robot genie resources and for what becomes the central civilizational question, you're going to see the whole economy back its way into central planning.

let's have the tool we created as a society called "the government" regulate it instead of waiting for "the market" to price things accurately.

Because let's be real golf courses will pay higher prices and poor people will suffer the burden if we wait for your idea to magically happen

The government is the entity that enforces the existing water rights system.

It's better to have everyone pay the fair market price. Price isn't arbitrary, it reflects the real cost to produce the good. It encourages efficient use. If you feel one usage is more worthwhile, you can subsidize it.

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