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Comment by duncan_bayne | Hacker News Reader

http://boingboing.net/2009/11/16/is-there-really-a-wa.html

"Neither in developed or developing countries is there a physical scarcity of water. The problem is lack of infrastructure, and more importantly, the lack of management. And those are things that are bad in both the developing and developed world."

Furthermore, treating droughts with water rationing actually makes the problem worse:

http://mises.org/library/clean-water-scarcity-and-market-pri...

"In the case of droughts government monopolies set prices arbitrarily and this sends consumers distorted prices. Just as bad crops increase the price of oranges so should droughts increase the price of water. Individuals then internalize their decisions to make best use of the scare resources — their own finances and the water commodity. Government distorting prices prevents individuals from acting most efficiently to conserve scarce resources."

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The problem is liberals and conservatives. Liberals tend to block infrastructure for "green" or NIMBY reasons, while conservatives de-fund it because infrastructure is socialism.

It's time to smash the whole political continuum and start implementing policies that work based on reason and evidence instead of vapid ideology and back room corruption.

An excellent proposal. The first thing to do is stop allocating water through the political process, and start using the price system.

I'd put it slightly differently: it's time to start implementing policies based on ideology that is itself grounded in reality.

Taxpayer funded infrastructure is socialism, and is a species of the problem discussed in the second article I linked.

Edited: perhaps I should clarify the above since I'm getting downvoted into oblivion (without argumentation, but that's another issue).

Essentially, the issue with existing policies is that they aren't based on ideology, or that they are but the ideology itself is wrong.

That is, coercing taxpayers to pay for infrastructure is not only morally wrong, it causes price distortions, moral hazards and malinvestment that all contribute to the 'water shortage' that people are worried about.

The correct solution is to entirely deregulate the production and provision of water, and let the free market determine the real price.

Things like water distribution are natural monopolies. Or are you suggesting that we have several independent water vendors built completely separate water pipeline infrastructures?

From http://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly (with emphasis added):

"Furthermore, competition is said to cause consumer inconvenience because of the construction of duplicative facilities, e.g., digging up the streets to put in dual gas or water lines. Avoiding such inconveniences is another reason offered for government franchise monopolies for industries with declining long-run average total costs.

It is a myth that natural-monopoly theory was developed first by economists, and then used by legislators to "justify" franchise monopolies. The truth is that the monopolies were created decades before the theory was formalized by intervention-minded economists, who then used the theory as an ex post rationale for government intervention. At the time when the first government franchise monopolies were being granted, the large majority of economists understood that large-scale, capital-intensive production did not lead to monopoly, but was an absolutely desirable aspect of the competitive process."

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