When Water Usage and Prices Are Controlled by Government

Living in Italy, Americans were shocked to learn that they couldn’t drive their cars in Verona on certain days if their licenses ended in odd numbers and on other days if their licenses ended in even numbers. Caught driving on the wrong day, the penalty was stiff. It was the bureaucrats’ way of dealing with pollution that affected air quality, soot deposits on marble statues, and buildings in town.  

In Modesto, California, the city deals with water shortages, whether real or imagined, by giving citations and fines to odd-numbered addresses that water lawns on Tuesdays when only even-numbered addresses can use sprinkler systems.

“We have two seasons of enforcement and so we entered the new season several weeks ago,” Modesto City spokesperson, Thomas Reeves said. “There are strict days; three days a week that you are allowed to water and it’s the same for a residential unit or a business.” https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2019/05/30/nurses-get-drenched-during-demonstration-hospital-warned-about-water-use/

As always, one-party state environmentalist California is ahead in curbing and controlling use of resources. It has enacted in 2018 Cal2022 water use controls they call “water-efficiency standards” in preparation for the manufactured global warming now turned into a profitable climate change industry. “The rules are aimed at water districts to cut per capita water usage.” This will eventually force individual customers into compliance.

By 2022, each person will be allowed to use 55 gallons per day and by 2030, 50 gallons per day. To put in better perspective, if you take an 8-minute shower, 17 gallons of water are used. A load of laundry uses 40 gallons, and a bathtub can hold 80 to 100 gallons of water.  

An old dishwasher uses 10 gallons of water per load. A new dishwasher with standards put in place in 2013 uses 5 gallons of water. An Energy Star certified dishwasher uses as little as 3 gallons of water per load. It is alleged that a full load of dishes washed by hand uses 27 gallons of water.

An older model top-loading washing machine uses 30-45 gallons of water, depending on the model. Front-loading and high efficiency washing machines use 15 gallons of water per load.

Sacramento Suburban Water District offers toilet rebates, complimentary showerheads, and complimentary faucets.  They are required to perform stress tests on their water leaks. A representative said, “Right now we lose up to 30 percent of urban water just to leaks in the system.” If a water district does not comply, the fines are $10,000 per day. https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/06/08/new-california-water-law-restrictions-shower-laundry/

Conservation of resources and natural habitats are a noble goal and we should try to conserve as much as we can. But micromanaging people’s lives does not work so well, it ends up in tyranny.

I can still vividly remember having to bathe by boiling a pot of water on the stove, going days and weeks without a bath, having to do without water altogether, especially in summer time when the communist government that controlled everything decided to clean the water tanks of rust and mineral deposits while we trekked to the water truck parked conveniently five blocks away to get a bucket of water at a time for drinking and cooking. The globalists who want to stop electricity use and other modern conveniences use in the third world today would have been pleased that we did not have dishwashers or washing machines.

And the United Nations declared its megatrend campaign for water for sustainable development (everything now must be sustainable this and sustainable that), one of the 17 goals of Agenda 21 now morphed into Agenda 2030 – water and sanitation for all. https://www.webuildvalue.com/en/megatrends/facing-the-problem-of-water-scarcity.html

We did protect the environment from pollution because nobody had cars except the elites, we just took buses and trains everywhere or walked. We did not have dishwashers or washing machines. Yet the environment was terribly polluted – the air, the soil, and the rivers. The commies did not care about spoiling the environment on an industrial scale.

As Dave Foreman of Earth First said, “We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for Capitalists and their projects – we must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.” What a primitive life that will be!

The government can certainly try to control consumption behavior by law and economically through price controls. It has done so and still does with various problems and consequences. Put in simple economic terms, when the quantity supplied is less than the quantity demanded, shortages result.

Governments can micromanage the use of a resource and restrict it through price controls. But government intervention into the free market by law can affect negatively many sectors and subsectors of the economy that need a lot of water to produce their output (paper, agriculture, orchards, vineyards, gardens, livestock) or service (hospitals, water parks, pools).

After 1971, when President Nixon decided to experiment with price controls, the economy experienced a plague of shortages - it seemed to be “running out of nearly everything.” When price controls ended in 1974, most of the shortages disappeared.

Price controls cause favoritism and corruption, enforceability problems, auxiliary restrictions, and limitations of volume of transactions.

When shortages or surpluses are created due to price controls, someone gets to buy or sell the limited quantity available. This can lead to discrimination along various lines, political favoritism, and corruption in government.

We had artificially low prices in the economy run by the Communist Party of Romania which resulted in long lines and favoritism of the communist elite class which was able to buy scarce commodities in their own special stores while the rest of us were on the Ceausescu diet.

Inevitably consumers must pay higher prices to suppliers. It is more insidious in industries where numerous suppliers exist. It is hard to monitor the behavior of so many sellers and their attempts to circumvent the law.

New laws may add auxiliary restrictions in order to enforce the original restrictions. So, the marketplace becomes more complex and more controlled by the legal system and suffocating government rules.

A classic example are the laws in New York City which ban conversion of rent-controlled apartments into condominiums. When rent-controlled apartments were enacted, the shortage of affordable apartments increased as landlords remodeled apartments into office space which allowed them to charge whatever rent the free market allowed instead of the low government controlled-rent on apartments.

Last, but not least, government intervention in the market, can lead to misallocation of resources. One example is the Russian farmers who used to feed their animals bread instead of unprocessed grains because price ceilings kept the price of bread very low. Why would they want bread to be so low priced? Because bread was a main staple in the Russian diet and kept them from going hungry on the rationed food in the stores.

It is true that the developed world contributes to the wasteful utilization of resources, including water. But do we need the daddy government micromanaging the behavior of everything we do?

Do elected bureaucrats have the right to protect a tiny fish, the delta smelt, to the detriment of millions of humans whose crops were devastated during a drought season while the government dumped fresh water into the ocean?

We could do better in conserving in many areas but showering with a bucket of water is not one of them. We could follow the late dictator Hugo Chavez’s advice to take 3-minute showers, but I am not so sure he followed his advice as he became rich beyond any socialist dictator’s dreams. His left his daughter billions when he died.