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Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appre
by bradleyjg 5y ago
Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good.
It’s not a matter of what I think ought to be the case or ought to have happened. It’s how to solve the problem at hand given the legal constraints that exist.
It’s possible those precedents could be overturned and open up the policy space, but given the current make up of the Supreme Court I think that’s unlikely to happen in the next few decades.
- theptip 5y agoIt seems that you’re making a claim about what policies are possible; I don’t have enough domain knowledge here to disagree. My point was just that If most voters are opposed to your solution, it won’t happen - even if that means nothing happens and we maintain the broken status quo - regardless of whether it is the only way forward within our current legal framework. In other words, noting that while it sounds viable from a raw economics perspective, it might hit problems with voter acceptability. And voters do care about what “aught to have happened”, for better or worse.
- bradleyjg 5y agoI would never bet against the crappy status quo lasting indefinitely because voters would rather stamp their feet than face reality as it is and pick the least bad choice.
- lumost 5y agoOn the other hand couldn’t the government choose to use eminent domain, regulate how water can be used, or even divert the water entirely?
- bradleyjg 5y agoYes, but they’d have to cut big checks to the existing rights holders.
- lumost 5y agoThe government doesn’t need to write me a check when they rezone my property and block future construction.
- bradleyjg 5y agoThat’s because the Supreme Court said that’s not a taking except in extreme cases. See Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc., 544 U.S. 528 (2005) for the current state of the law on regulatory takings.
- lumost 5y agoWhich should open the door for regulating agricultural water use in California right? If California mandated that crops requiring more than X water per acre couldn’t be grown would that be a taking?
- bradleyjg 5y agoI don’t know if you could pass a law exactly like that, but it’s a good point that California could attack the problem from the other direction—-keep water law as is but squeeze the companies farming the desert using other parts of its regulatory toolkit.
- lumost 5y agoAye I’d also imagine that it is within the current legal framework to “tax” water property/rights in accordance with the allotment. It would be easy enough to exclude residential zoned water allotments from the taxes to avoid taxing drinking water.