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.

Convenient Lies and Governance of the Earth

“The Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.” (Tenth Amendment)

While the people of Tombstone, Arizona, are waiting to get water back on line, the federal government is asking them for $80,000 in order to tell me why they cannot have it back unless they use only simple tools to do it with, like hand tools and wheelbarrows. Boulders the size of Volkswagens are trapping the waterlines, buried in some places under 12 ft of mud.

USDA Forest Service alludes to provisions in the Wilderness Act, which forbids the use of heavy machinery. According to Joe Wolverton, II, “water rights granted to Tombstone by the previous title owners predate the enactment of the Wilderness Act by about 80 years.” (The New American)

“The Town too Tough to Die” of 1,600 inhabitants had found itself in the middle of a terrible life and death quandary as a result of the Monument Fire in 2011 which destroyed the Huachuca Mountains pipelines carrying water to the town from the source in the Miller Canyon Wilderness Area. (Joe Wolverton, II, The New American)

According to Hugh Holub, water rights expert, quoted by Joe Wolverton, II, “Though the water may originate on National Forest lands, Bureau of Land Management lands, and other federally managed lands, the rights to that water belongs to the farms and ranches and cities.” Lawyers for this administration and environmentalists disagree.

The Club of Rome proclaims in their 1990 publication, The First Global Revolution, on page 75, “The common enemy of humanity is Man.” The paragraph beneath this title describes how they concocted the idea of man-made global warming.

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea of pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill…The real enemy is humanity itself.”

Water shortages can be real or government manufactured like the case of Tombstone, Arizona. The EPA started a “green war” against farmers in the fertile San Joaquin Valley in California; it left one of America’s main agricultural regions a dust bowl in 2009. The EPA-made drought put many farmers out of business, thousands became jobless, and millions of Americans paid higher prices for fruits and vegetables imported from other countries that could have been grown in California. EPA and the environmentalists protected a tiny fish, the delta smelt, while endangering humans.

Maurice Strong and Al Gore are members of the Club of Rome and involved in privately owned carbon-trading groups who stand to gain billions if the man-made global warming fraud survives and the EPA continues to destroy our economy, jobs, and our way of life.

A world government is gaining tract through social science consensus. There is nothing scientific about social science; it is strictly the opinion of a group of people who are in consensus or agreement concerning the need to regulate the planet in line with their beliefs. Science is exact and a fact. Social science is an opinion and a belief derived from personal experience, perception, or five-point scale surveys of groups of like-minded individuals and ignorant people.

In preparation for the UN Agenda Rio +20 conference in June 2012, F. Biermann et al., 33 social scientists, published in Science magazine on March 16, 2012, their contribution to the “earth system governance and planetary stewardship.” The article appears under the heading Science and Government, “Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance.”

It does not take a rocket scientist to determine that government policy is not science, consensus is not scientific, and the liberals’ mantra, “global warming science is settled,” is a lie.

Biermann et al. proposed “seven building blocks,” the result of social science-based research conducted in 2011 by the Earth System Governance Project. This paper was designed to “contribute to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, which will focus on the institutional framework for sustainable development and possible reforms of the intergovernmental governance system.” The writers believe that, in spite of differences of opinion among social scientists, there is an increasing consensus in many areas, therefore the planet must be ready for one world governance, erasing all traces of sovereignty in the name of saving the planet.

1.      A global environmental agency similar to the World Health Organization should be formed to set agendas, develop norms, manage compliance, assess science, and build capacity.

 

2.      Integrate sustainable development from local to global levels into a powerful United Nations Sustainable Development Council.

3.      “Better integration of sustainability governance requires governments to close remaining regulatory gaps at the global level,” including the sharing of nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and geo-engineering.

Closing regulatory gaps explains the Executive Order on May 1, 2012 on Promoting International Regulatory Cooperation. “The purpose of the E.O. is to encourage the harmonization of regulatory requirements to simplify regulatory compliance, reduce costs for transnational companies and facilitate international trade.” (Jonathan H. Adler)

4.      Governments must place a “stronger emphasis on planetary concerns in economic governance.”

5.      Voting on global policy must be weighted for some countries and no veto power granted to anyone in order to speed up international norm setting.

6.      “Global governance through UN-type institutions tends to give a larger role to international and domestic bureaucracies, at the cost of national parliaments.”

A simple translation - global governance would supersede national governments. Countries would be divided into regions and/or different interests such as environmentalists, industry, youth, etc. The United States would thus no longer have states; we would have regions and regionalism under the aegis of the United Nations Sustainable Development Council.

7.      Equity and fairness (read socialism/communism) would guide the transfer of wealth to poorer countries. The paper proposes “novel financial mechanisms to transfer wealth through global emissions markets and air transportation levies for sustainability purposes.” The middle class would completely disappear under such equity and fairness. Everyone would be equally poor and miserable, with the self-appointed global governance elites at the top.

The paper oozes a sense of urgency, like thieves trying to steal as much loot as possible before they are discovered and unmasked. These 33 social scientists do not want to stop just at transfer of wealth, destroying the middle class, erasing national boundaries, and neutering national governments, they want to “change the behavior of citizens,” and re-orient “the private sector toward a green economy.”