Tales of Two Lawns Says Government’s All Wet

When we get bad service from a business, we get angry and go elsewhere. When we get bad service from the government, we shrug. There’s no place else to go. Besides, who expects anything else?

If California had a socialist food system, there would be breakfast shortages and supper rationing. The politically powerful would have banquets; the average citizen would get crumbs. Food police would inspect your garbage.

It is no different with water.

In a free market, the price system balances supply and demand so that one doesn’t outrun the other. Shortages are a governmental creation. If the feds had frozen gas prices in response to the gulf crisis, we’d have long lines. Far better to let prices rise, so drivers can fill up without waiting two hours.

In a drought, water prices should also rise. When there’s no drought, they should fall. But a socialist enterprise like the Metropolitan Water District can’t set the right price any more than a Soviet collective farm.

So government uses force. It fines people who sprinkle their lawns on the wrong day or wash down their driveways. And it orders citizens to cut water use by 30% and 40%. Not that our rulers are consistent. In West Covina, a man got a ticket and was threatened with a $1,000 fine and six months in jail for not watering his brown lawn--the dread crime of “failure to maintain landscaping.”

The man tried to tell the lawn cop that his grass had died of fungus. But government, which--above all other institutions--ought to understand fungus, refused to listen.

Meanwhile, Central Valley farmers grow rich on water welfare. They pay so little, thanks to the “deficit-reduction” Feds, that waste of millions of acre-feet is a way of life. If farmers had to pay the real price, they would install drip-irrigation systems and line their ditches with concrete, or go out of business.

Despite what government judges have held, water is too precious to be left to the politicians. Only private, competitive water companies and a free price system can solve the water problem. That would be the real Big Green initiative.