JULIA'S EMPTY LIFE.

Fourteen years ago, the Morale Conditioners of the Obama Regime released their case for a life succoured by government, from the cradle to the grave.

As long as Julia has Barack Obama, she can get by without a man.

There's a hilarious send-up of the presentation, which has been laughed unto scorn all over the internet, at Reason.  Here's Jennifer Rubin, unimpressed by those fish.  "I would briefly note the irony of the liberal feminists’ idealized single woman: no husband and utterly dependent on government. This is progress?" She endorses a William Bennett reaction.

Julia's entire life is defined by her interactions with the state. Government is everywhere and each step of her life is tied to a government program. Notably absent in her story is any relationship with a husband, family, church or community, except a "community" garden where she works post-retirement. Instead, the state has taken their place and is her primary relationship.

Indeed so, but Mr Bennett notes it takes something more substantive than Not Obama to replace Our President. "Conservatives must be able to provide Julia an alternative vision for a better future. Without it, Julia might have nowhere else to turn but to the government, and that is nothing to laugh about."

Yes, dear reader, before there was a Donald Trump in politics for Jennifer Rubin to be deranged about, she wasn't deranged!

Now comes Common Dreams contributor Lindsay K. Saunders, demonstrating precisely how little suckling at the public mammary is to laugh about.  "As life becomes less and less affordable for working people, we need to restore and expand our social safety net so those of us who work for a living can keep our families affordably housed, fed, and healthy."

BURYING THE LEDE.

Cold Spring Shops, nine years ago.

Investors Business Daily.  "Water is a commodity just like any other, and its allocation should not be left to governments." The one complication is the rule of capture with respect to ground water, and the common-property problem that follows.  Even so, prices communicate incentives: is it worth digging deeper, and can the water be more profitably sold to someone else rather than used by the well digger?

It all seems so straightforward, and yet policy makers and Allegedly Smart People introduce unnecessary complexities.

Thanks, Allegedly Smart People.

Humanity has thrown the global water cycle off balance “for the first time in human history,” fueling a growing water disaster that will wreak havoc on economies, food production and lives, according to a landmark new report.

Decades of destructive land use and water mismanagement have collided with the human-caused climate crisis to put “unprecedented stress” on the global water cycle, said the report published Wednesday by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, a group of international leaders and experts.

The water cycle refers to the complex system by which water moves around the Earth. Water evaporates from the ground — including from lakes, rivers and plants — and rises into the atmosphere, forming large rivers of water vapor able to travel long distances, before cooling, condensing and eventually falling back to the ground as rain or snow.

There's more to the water cycle than the extra atmospheric water boiled up by volcanic eruptions.

“For the first time in human history, we are pushing the global water cycle out of balance,” said Johan Rockström, co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water and a report author. “Precipitation, the source of all freshwater, can no longer be relied upon.”

The report differentiates between “blue water,” the liquid water in lakes, rivers and aquifers, and “green water,” the moisture stored in soils and plants.

While the supply of green water has long been overlooked, it is just as important to the water cycle, the report says, as it returns to the atmosphere when plants release water vapor, generating about half of all rainfall over land.

Disruptions to the water cycle are “deeply intertwined” with climate change, the report found.

A stable supply of green water is vital for supporting vegetation that can store planet-heating carbon. But the damage humans inflict, including destroying wetlands and tearing down forests, is depleting these carbon sinks and accelerating global warming. In turn, climate change-fueled heat is drying out landscapes, reducing moisture and increasing fire risk.

The crisis is made more urgent by the huge need for water. The report calculates that, on average, people need a minimum of about 4,000 liters (just over 1,000 gallons) a day to lead a “dignified life,” far above the 50 to 100 liters the United Nations says is needed for basic needs, and more than most regions will be able to provide from local sources.

Watch for the Doomsday Environmentalists to go after your shower, your washing machine, your back yard pool.  There's nothing like a coordination problem for the Allegedly Smart People to find ways to expand their authority.

Richard Allan, a climate science professor at Reading University, England, said the report “paints a grim picture of human-caused disruption to the global water cycle, the most precious natural resource that ultimately sustains our livelihoods.”

Human activities “are altering the fabric of our land and the air above which is warming the climate, intensifying both wet and dry extremes, and sending wind and rainfall patterns out of kilter,” added Allan, who was not involved in the report.

The crisis can only be addressed through better management of natural resources and massive cuts in planet-heating pollution, he told CNN.

The report’s authors say world governments must recognize the water cycle as a “common good” and address it collectively. Countries are dependent on each other, not only through lakes and rivers that span borders, but also because of water in the atmosphere, which can travel huge distances — meaning decisions made in one country can disrupt rainfall in another.

Dear reader, you have to scroll to the very bottom of the well, er, closing paragraphs of the story, to find the wisdom.

The report calls for a “fundamental regearing of where water sits in economies,” including better pricing to discourage wastefulness and the tendency to plant water-thirsty crops and facilities, such as data centers, in water-stressed regions.

“The global water crisis is a tragedy but is also an opportunity to transform the economics of water,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization and a co-chair of the commission that published the report. Valuing water properly is essential, she added, “so as to recognize its scarcity and the many benefits it delivers.”

If you can trade it, you can value it, and you can allocate it efficiently.

THE ATMOSPHERIC RIVER TO THE RESCUE.

At the end of January, we noted that a canal built through a tropical rain forest could still go through a lot of water.  "It's not enough that Iranian proxies and African pirates are scaring shippers away from Suez, which makes for intermodal business on Eurasian railways.  Now, the rains aren't coming in Central America, and transloading in Panama has picked up."  It's May, the rainy season is starting in the Canal Zone, and La Niña is weakening.

There might be a slight break in the bad news, and it comes with an interesting little sidenote attached for climate cultists desperately flogging the global warming narrative.

As far as the Panama Canal situation goes, things are looking up in a good, rainy, and wet way. Last August, they had a 20-day wait and a 200-ship transit backlog due to low water levels, which was forecast to worsen this past February. The Panama Canal Authority was planning to drop the number of ships even further.

Then the rains came.

They never did have to cut back to 18 from 24 vessel passages a day.

In fact, by March, things had improved to where they could bump up a couple of extra slots thanks to "above average rainfall."

Sometimes a well-understood phenomenon of long standing is well-understood and of long standing because it ... works.

The climate phenomenon known as El Niño—and not climate change—was a key driver in low rainfall that disrupted shipping at the Panama Canal last year, scientists said Wednesday.

A team of international scientists found that El Niño—a natural warming of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide—doubled the likelihood of the low precipitation Panama received during last year's rainy season. That dryness reduced water levels at the reservoir that feeds freshwater to the Panama Canal and provides drinking water for more than half of the Central American country.

Human-caused climate change was not a primary driver of the Central American country's unusually dry monsoon season, the World Weather Attribution group concluded, after comparing the rainfall levels to climate models for a simulated world without current warming.

The study has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal yet but follows scientifically accepted techniques, and past such studies have frequently been published months later.

One surely hopes that working papers turn into minimal publishable units eventually, rather than having the editor turn it down because the results have been so widely shared in the working paper.  (Yes, that's been known to happen.)  It should not come as much of a surprise that natural variability is a stronger explanation than the results of an extrapolation model, which is only as good as the priors of its composer.

DESPERATELY SEEKING THE HOUSING FAIRY.

It should be clear by now that "Common Dreams" means "wishful thinking."  The latest believer in miracles is Farrah Hassen, who somehow passed the bar exam, offering "Housing Is a Human Right, Not a Luxury Commodity."  I guess the communists aren't whining about those little boxes made of ticky-tacky any more.  "In the wealthiest country on the planet, this is unacceptable."  The problem, in her nightmares, is that people are adding to the housing stock.

Over the past decade, according to the Harvard study, the majority of growth in renter households has come from Millennials and Gen Zers who continue to be priced out of homeownership while also paying more for a declining supply of affordable units.

Meanwhile, construction in the high-end “luxury” rental market, which drives up rents for everyone else, remains in an upward trend. And private equity firms like Blackstone, the largest landlord in the U.S., have been expanding their real estate portfolios. These trends have fueled increased housing costs and evictions across communities.

The Harvard study revealed that our nation’s aging rental stock also needs crucial investment. Nearly half of renters with disabilities live in homes that are minimally or not at all accessible. Further, around 4 million renter households live in units with structural problems and lack basic services like electricity, water, or heat.

That's quite the bundle of points, isn't it?  First, how is it that construction expanding the supply of high-end rentals drives up the rents for everybody else?  (Let's leave aside for the moment what those additional upscale renters implies for the vanishing middle class, dear reader.)  Are those renters leaving cold-water flats for tower apartments with pools and a lake view?  Or might their departure simultaneously lead to vacancies in less-tony apartments or condos, and a removal of those high income bidders from the waiting lists there?

LIVING AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS?

Common Dreams contributor Whitney Tucker buries the lede.

Communities nationwide depend on federal aid to build and support basic public infrastructure and to help every resident access what they need for their and their family’s health, well-being, and success. By slashing this aid, the House Republican bill would badly harm our communities, and that’s a bad deal for all of us.

Her salary depends on lobbying for more public assistance, and that "bad deal" makes more sense when so viewed.

State and local governments would be forced to slash funding for programs that people and communities rely upon every day. The harms done would include more crowded classrooms, even fewer families able to afford child care, new parents lacking the help they need to feed their babies properly, malfunctioning water facilities, and less in funding for homelessness services and substance use treatment.

No state would be spared. High-population states like California and New York would see very large dollar cuts of up to $170.9 billion and $144.7 billion, respectively. Less populous and more rural states, meanwhile, would feel deep pain relative to the size of their budgets. For example, the cut of up to $8.3 billion in federal funding for West Virginia over ten years is roughly 1.5 times the size of the entire state budget in fiscal year 2024.

The harm from these service cuts comes in addition to the millions of people from whom the bill would take away health coverage, food, and cash assistance if they don’t meet onerous work requirements.

Predictably, she's also got something positive to say about hiring more revenooers, under the misapprehension that they will audit the tax returns of high net worth individuals more assiduously.

It's all special pleading, and it elides the basic point, which is that the states being adversely affected don't generate enough commerce to support the services the voters would like, or they are seeing that punitive taxation of productive people pushes them out.

For what?  Ineffective schools?  The silly idea that water is not a commodity?  The closure of the psychiatric hospitals?

The Congress might not recognize reality.  Debt ceiling or no, the day will come when the bond traders will buy Treasuries only at a deep discount.

IF YOU CAN TRADE IT, YOU CAN ALLOCATE IT EFFICIENTLY.

Years ago, environmentalist wackos had a gripe that ran something like "We'll have abundant solar energy when Standard Oil can make money off it."  That's cathartic populist froth, but it misses the major point, that making money means engaging in mutually beneficial trade, a reality that is too often ignored by self-styled progressives.

Predictably, the opportunity to allocate Western waters efficiently sets off the current generation of environmentalist wackos.

Financial speculators are buying and selling rights to the Colorado River's dwindling water resources in a bid to profit as historic drought conditions intensified by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis lead to worsening scarcity.

Wall Street investment firms "have identified the drought as an opportunity to make money," Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, told CBS News on Tuesday. "I view these drought profiteers as vultures. They're looking to make a lot of money off this public resource."

Matthew Diserio, the co-founder and president of a Manhattan-based hedge fund called Water Asset Management (WAM), makes no secret of his intentions, having described water in the United States as "the biggest emerging market on Earth" and "a trillion-dollar market opportunity." The company's website declares that "scarce clean water is the resource defining this century, much like plentiful oil defined the last."

A newly published joint investigation by CBS News and The Weather Channel found that WAM has purchased at least $20 million worth of land in Western Colorado over the past five years, making it one of the biggest landowners in a farming and ranching region known as the Grand Valley.

According to Mueller, WAM has bought more than 2,500 acres of farmland in the area. But "it's the water"—not the land—that investors are really interested in, he said, observing that the farmland comes with water rights.

To Kenny Stancil, it's apparently sufficient to use "making money" as an epithet, never mind the dynamic his very next paragraph reveals.

Notably, WAM has "hired Colorado's former top water official as one of its lawyers," CBS News reported. Diserio previously stated that "one of his firm's strategies is to profit from water in part by making the farms it buys more efficient and then selling parts of its water rights to other farmers and cities increasingly desperate for the natural resource."

It's not as if using the water more efficiently is some sort of superexploitative plot, the way precision scheduled railroading or adjunctification might be.  Or that the strings the national government attaches will be helpful.

As the long-brewing crisis surrounding the Colorado River grows more acute, the federal government has taken steps to compel state-level policymakers to improve how they manage water resources in the increasingly arid region.

For instance, "Congress recently allocated $4 billion in drought funding that can be used to pay farmers to fallow their land and not use their water," CBS News reported. "Some Western states, including Colorado, are also considering paying some farmers to keep their lands fallow." Agriculture accounts for 70% of withdrawals from the Colorado River.

The Jarrett regency, however, is full of self-styled progressives with lots of sentimentality and no common sense. Is it more sensible to figure out how to raise crops using less water, or to not raise crops at all?

The Future of Water Act, as the congressional Democrats' bicameral legislation is titled, would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to affirm that water is a human right to be managed for public benefit—not a commodity to be bought and sold by investment firms. The bill would also prohibit the trading of water rights on futures markets—a recently invented financial ploy widely condemned as "dystopian."

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said at the time of the bill's introduction that "with the climate crisis delivering historically devastating droughts across the West, it is clearer than ever that water should be treated as a scarce, essential resource, not a commodity for Wall Street and financial speculators."

"This groundbreaking legislation would put a lid on dangerous water futures trading before it creates a crisis," said Hauter, "and it reinforces the fact that water must be managed as a public resource, not a corporate profit center."

As if the existing regime of public resource management has performed so well for us.

The costs of the water and power projects are great, but those Yuma growers see low prices for the Colorado River water they use because they are living at the expense of somebody else.  I also recall, in the middle 1970s, something called "flood watering" being a thing in Phoenix.  Yup, cover your lawn with water.  We had water meters, and even in Milwaukee there was odd-even sprinkling days, even with new water intake cribs being built as the city grew, as it still was back then.

But nobody wants to get into the implications either of understanding that water is a commodity and ought be priced accordingly, or that those fresh vegetables (and Californian cheese, for Elsie's sake!) coming to the Twin Cities in the winter look cheaper because taxpayers in the Great Lakes are helping pay for those southwestern water projects, and they might be on the hook for even more water projects.

On the other hand, perhaps the environmentalist wackos would just as soon there be no water projects.  Has the recent Californian flooding been worse for the absence of any new flood control projects?

IT'S CALLED THE BENEFIT PRINCIPLE, AND MARKET TESTS ARE USEFUL.

A contributor to the house organ for business as usual in higher education inadvertently steps on his own argument.  Higher Ed Is a Public Good. Let’s Fund It Like One.  Seriously?

Bad economics. A public good has two properties, nonexclusive use and nonrivalrous consumption. [Former Northern Illinois president John] Peters's own arguments will contradict both of those properties. A more accurate argument might be that there are unpriced spillover benefits, or non-pecuniary externalities, to a university degree. That's for another day: are the marginal social benefits of a state-aided university worth the costs, or has Robert Fulghum (details or compare prices) correctly identified the sole source of a positive benefit-cost ratio?

That's not where James N. H. Spencer goes wrong, in fact he goes even further astray.

If we are serious in arguing that higher education is a public good, then we should finance it like one; we should take some lessons from my own field, infrastructure planning.

Financing an equitable higher education can be done: The U.S. has near-universal water supplies, transportation, and electricity for even its poorest residents. What would happen if we applied the same principles to the public goods that universities provide?

Public infrastructure is rarely funded fully by upfront subsidies in the way that advocates for “free college” suggest. Instead, infrastructure projects rely on floating debt that is tied to long-term user fees through the life of the infrastructure. Think of your water bill, which over 30 years helps pay down the debt associated with building your local water system. According to the National Association of Counties, government investments in transportation infrastructure, for example, total substantially less than half of the actual costs, with bond-market investors covering the bulk of the upfront costs. Over time, individual users collectively pay back that debt through costs like gas taxes, transit fares, or tolls. Whatever the repayment mechanism, end users never take on that personal debt the way we now expect college students to do.

So many things wrong there. I can only envision the caterwauling from the "water is a fundamental right" crowd in higher education, for whom the very notion of water as a commodity causes anguish.  I mean, didn't Milwaukee's sewer socialists install water meters and sell the dried activated sewage sludge as fertilizer?  There's no reason a water utility can't be a private company; indeed, doesn't the popularity of bottled spring water of various types suggest the public water works deals in hot and cold running crud?  There's no reason an electric utility can't be a private company, and it's only environmental extremists that impede the upgrading and repair of the transmission lines, and New Deal brains trusters that preclude power companies owning electric railways.

THE PEOPLE WHO CAUSED THE PROBLEM WILL FIX THE PROBLEM. NO WORRIES.

The government causeth the problem, the government will fix it.

Based on projected water levels for 2023, the tier 2 shortage will force drought-ravaged Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico to draw less from the Colorado River, upon which 40 million people in seven states and Mexico rely. Arizona will face the biggest cut—592,000 acre-feet, or about one-fifth of the state's annual allocation, while an 8% reduction in Nevada is expected to have little impact in a state that recycles most of its indoor-use water and does not use its full allotment. Mexico's allotment [c.q.]

The move came after Colorado River Basin states failed to meet a federal deadline at the end of Monday to come up with a plan to achieve a 15% reduction in water use, an amount scientists say is needed to prevent water stored in dangerously depleted reservoirs from dropping even further.

Strictly speaking, a shortage always exists relative to a price, but to an order of people that refuse to think of treated water as a commodity, there will be no discussion of that excess demand at a zero price, only one of changing by politics the allotments that the Great White Father in Washington doles out (and that water rate paying residents along the Great Lakes subsidize.)

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

Stop washing your jeans.  There's nothing like calling attention to the reluctance to treat water like the commodity it is by letting your clothing get nasty and stinky.

A new study found that the mega-drought in the western U.S. is the worst it has been in 1,200 years, with a lead author telling NPR that roughly one-fifth of that current drought — which is shrinking reservoirs, depleting aquifers, lowering rivers and contributing to wildfires — can be attributed to human-caused climate change.

According to Levi's 2025 Water Action Strategy, which aims to save water on the manufacturing end, "By 2030, an estimated 45 cities worldwide (that’s nearly 470 million people) will be categorized as high-stress — which means the demand for water is higher than what’s available."

Gosh, if only there were a way to equilibrate supply with demand.  I mean, maybe you could even give totalitarian doofuses like John Feffer their climate emergency measures by calling the water rate a corrective tax.  That's apparently not something worth discussing.

Annie Mills, a young entrepreneur in the U.K. who received a Circular Economy Award for her final year projects, including one about how to save water, tells Yahoo Life, "I don't think many people know there's an issue, really, with water.”

Mills references an article in The Guardian, "England could run short of water within 25 years," and says that one of the issues is that water is very cheap in many parts of the world, including the United States and Europe. "So," she adds, "saving water is not incentivized."

We've called attention to that before.  I might be more sympathetic to youngsters running around in dirty dungarees because of the expense or inconvenience of washing them (hand washing, seriously??) than as some virtue signal.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The silliness did not take a break for the Festive Season, did it?  I was pleased to hear at least one reference to "asymptomatic false positives," though.  A lot of stuff came in, and there might be longish lists well into January.

It is time for a modicum of repetition.  Our gerontocracy is depriving young children of a normal life when it has long been clear that focused protection makes more sense.

There are a few other Cold Spring Shops themes that keep coming up.

THIS IS THE WAY THE INFRASTRUCTURE CRUMBLES.

The Associated Press reports on what's in the latest infrastructure bill that's on its way to Brandon's desk.

What did I tell you, dear reader?  "Unfortunately, too often city governments hope for some future 'stimulus' or 'infrastructure' package to make all the contingent liabilities go away. That way lies nasty reality checks."

Let us count the ways.

The bill would provide $110 billion to repair the nation's aging highways, bridges and roads. According to the White House, 173,000 total miles of America’s highways and major roads and 45,000 bridges are in poor condition. And the almost $40 billion for bridges is the single largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the interstate highway system, according to President Joe Biden's administration.

I'm being churlish when I point out that maybe some of that investment ought be written off, aren't I?

It gets better from there.

The $39 billion for public transit in the legislation would expand transportation systems, improve accessibility for people with disabilities and provide dollars to state and local governments to buy zero-emission and low-emission buses. The Department of Transportation estimates that the current repair backlog is more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 rail cars, 200 stations and thousands of miles of track and power systems.

How much of that can we lay off on previous capital grants from Washington, which are the large-scale version of Christmas toys, batteries not included?  The bus or rail car comes as a gift from Uncle Sugar, and the local transit authority is on the hook for the upkeep.  Ditto for airports and the air traffic control system.  As far as the power grid and water works, well, we have investor owned electric utilities and water is a commodity.  Maybe the best thing for the govcrnment to do might be to go away, particularly when they're using previous fiscal imprudence as evidence of current prudence.

The five-year spending package would be paid for by tapping $210 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief aid and $53 billion in unemployment insurance aid some states have halted, along with an array of other smaller pots of money, like petroleum reserve sales and spectrum auctions for 5G services.

Let's see, shouldn't preventing current oil patch development and then selling off some of the oil reserve be a firing offense?

NOBODY NEEDS TWO OR MORE RAIN BARRELS.

Ordinarily,  Reason's J. D. Tuccille might simply qualify for a Friday short take with his "The West needs markets in water, not allocations based on political considerations."  I make no apology for suggesting that water is a commodity and ought be allocated the same way any other commodity gets allocated, or for mocking the arid West for its unwillingness to do so.  Similarly, there's nothing new in noting that trade unites and politics divides, something that the water regulators seem to have trouble grasping, e.g., "You have to have markets that actually work, that allow competing users to resolve their competition amicably and efficiently rather than through political allocation of water."  Nor is it any surprise that people who think they are smarter than you will come up with ways to introduce excessive complexity and conceal it behind wordnoise.

"The Tier 1 declaration gives states and local communities reason to remove barriers to transferring water," observes Robert Glennon, law professor and water rights expert at the University of Arizona. "Market forces are playing an increasingly critical role in water management in the West. Many new demands for water are coming from voluntary transfers between willing sellers and desperate buyers."

That said, Glennon doesn't advocate a completely free market for water, since he fears that farmers, who consume the lion's share of the region's water, wouldn't be able to compete with urban users. He supports "a process to ensure that transfers are consistent with the public interest," though it's unclear how to keep that from degenerating into the political allocation of water against which Watson warned. He also may confuse "public interest" with sentimentality over inefficient use of a scarce resource.

Still, Glennon co-authored a piece for the Brookings Institution in 2014 advocating that "sensible water policy should allow someone who needs water to pay someone else to forgo her use of water or to invest in water conservation and, in return, to obtain access to the saved water."

That's true whether or not your tax dollars are making possible the cultivation of sugar beets on the eastern plains of Colorado.

But, seriously, there are limits on the placement of rain barrels.

Harvesting rainwater is also becoming more common as people embrace the practice—and as the law gets out of the way.

"Colorado's longtime ban on residential rain barrels has come to an end," Colorado State University celebrated in 2016. "Now most homeowners in the state are allowed to collect precipitation for later outdoor use."

Colorado still strictly limits households to two rain barrels, but other states are more relaxed.

"In the state of Arizona, it is legal to collect any rainwater that falls on your property for future use," the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center notes. The center offers a guide advising on how to do just that.

Still, graywater and rain barrels are only going to chip away at the problem so long as federal agencies allocate massive amounts of water based on political considerations. In a land where water is scarce, its use will be most efficiently determined by the prices that users are willing to pay in an open market.

A rain barrel might be a useful way to cope with higher water rates. Review the comparison of rates in those enlightened European countries that get plenty of rain with the flood-irrigation of Phoenix lawns.

IT'S WORLD WATER DAY.

There's some United Nations effort under that rubric.  It's about what you'd expect.  "Today, 785 million people are living without access to safe water, while 2 billion people are living without access to a toilet."

In the same way that the waters prevailed, the words will prevail.  Jump in, the water is fine.

ADVERSE SELECTION.

Kevin Williamson went on a trip through Appalachia.  For all of the efforts of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and all the other do-gooders who have taken up the cause, the area remains a poverty pocket in part because the most ambitious people have long since bailed.

Like its black urban counterparts, the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. As they go businesses disappear, institutions fall into decline, social networks erode, and there is little or nothing left over for those who remain. It’s a classic economic death spiral: The quality of the available jobs is not enough to keep good workers, and the quality of the available workers is not enough to attract good jobs. These little towns located at remote wide spots in helical mountain roads are hard enough to get to if you have a good reason to be here. If you don’t have a good reason, you aren’t going to think of one.

It's not that these parts of the country suffered a singularly bad day, such as when The Pennsylvania Railroad reduced the payroll in the Altoona, Penn., backshops, or when Big Steel saw the folly of maintaining small open-hearth works in the Mahoning Valley.  "The employed and upwardly mobile leave, taking their children, their capital, and their habits with them, clean clear of the Big White Ghetto, while the unemployed, the dependent, and the addicted are once again left behind."  There still is a sort of commerce, based on public assistance, and causing furrowed brows among advocates of the Nanny State.

Once a month, the debit card accounts of those receiving what we still call “food stamps” are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day the accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum — are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases of soda; reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.”

The naïve technocrats, in their naïvete, labor under the delusion that taking pop off the distribution list will somehow defund the druggies.

Last year, 18 big-city mayors, Mike Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel among them, sent the federal government a letter asking that soda be removed from the list of items eligible to be used for EBT purchases. Mayor Bloomberg delivered his standard sermon about obesity, nutrition, and the multiplex horrors of sugary drinks. But none of those mayors gets what’s really going on with sugar water and food stamps. Take soda off the list and there will be another fungible commodity to take its place. It’s possible that a great many cans of soda used as currency go a long time without ever being cracked — in a town this small, those selling soda to EBT users and those buying it back at half price are bound to be some of the same people, the soda merely changing hands ceremonially to mark the real exchange of value — pillbilly wampum.

Ultimately, the pop-to-pill economy suffers from a toxic mix of well-meaning enablement and contemporary relativism.

In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. It is not as though labor and enterprise are unknown here: Digging coal is hard work, farming is hard work, timbering is hard work — so hard that the best and brightest long ago packed up for Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or Memphis or Houston. There is to this day an Appalachian bar in Detroit and ex-Appalachian enclaves around the country. The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socioeconomic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.

“The government gives people checks, but nobody teaches them how to live,” says Teresa Barrett, a former high-school principal who now publishes the Owsley County newspaper. “You have people on the draw getting $3,000 a month, and they still can’t live. When I was at the school, we’d see kids come in from a long weekend just starved to death. But you’ll see those parents at the grocery store with their 15 cases of Pepsi, and that’s all they’ve got in the buggy — you know what they’re doing. Everybody knows, nobody does anything. And when you have that many people on the draw, that’s a big majority of voters.”

There's still not enough "seeing how to live" in the shadow of the projects, either.

If nothing else, Election 2020 revealed a deeply divided nation -- two Americas, not one -- though that dividing line marked anything but an even or obvious split. A startling number of Americans are trapped in wretched conditions and hungry for a clean break with the status quo. On the other hand, the rampant voter suppression and racialized gerrymandering of the last decade of American politics suggests that extremists from the wealthier America will go to remarkable lengths to undercut the power of those at the bottom of this society. They have proven ready to use every tool and scare tactic of racist division and subterfuge imaginable to stop poor Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and white potential voters from building new and transformative alliances, including a new electorate.

It’s time to move beyond the defeatist myth of the Solid South or even the dulling comfort of a Midwestern “blue wall.” Across the South and the Midwest, there are voter-suppression states still to win, not for a party, but for a fusion movement of the many. The same could be true for the coasts and the Southwest, where there remains a sleeping giant of poor and low-income people yet to be pulled into political action. If this country is ever going to be built back better, to borrow Joe Biden's campaign pledge, it’s time to turn to its abandoned corners; to, that is, the other America of Martin Luther King that still haunts us, whether we know it or not.

That could get interesting, if the coronavirus lockdowns that are destroying the lives of people who weren't in a position, back in March, to work from home and stay in safe pods, also create a coalition of people who will not be made into vassals.

The challenge, and Mr Williamson has recognized that, is that there's a tension between a political order in which the Powers that Be don't treat fellow citizens as vassals, and a political order in which the right to be left alone might leave people behind and in a bad place, as in the hollows and in the slums.

What America needs most right now, then, is boring old bourgeois libertarianism: the lived philosophy of peacefully enjoying life and property while mostly minding your own business. That philosophy rules out attempts to enforce orthodoxies of thought and expression, no matter how good the cause, and refuses to treat other people's lives and property as dispensable in the pursuit of political goals, no matter how noble.

When people reject those principles, they create civic spaces where no one can thrive—in the long run, not even them.

The current pass has been a long time in coming. The Beats and the hippies were for the most part in a position to opt out when it was fun and opt back in because it was still possible. Much the same thing is true of the credentialed nihilists who thought deconstructing bourgeois norms was an interesting exercise, but did they give up their tenured posts?  The people left in the decaying neighborhoods had no such succor.  Buckle in.

THE SHAPE OF THE CIVIL WAR TO COME?

In the pages of Minneapolis's Star-Tribune, it will be to fight off the great siphoning.

Those far-off onlookers thirst mightily for the Lakes’ 6.5 million billion gallons of fresh water that, to them, just sits there before running off to the ocean. Wasted.

It’s easy for us lake-landers to dismiss such thoughts, but those in the American Southwest are up against a 17-year drought that keeps getting worse. After an unusually warm winter, it’s expected to worsen still more this summer due to a dearth of mountain snow that will again leave Colorado River flow far below normal, with forecasts of dry and very hot weather à la La Niña.

What’s beyond scary is that NASA computer models indicate that the West could be facing a 50-year megadrought, the first such event since long before Europeans even knew North America existed.

The article mentions water stress in the Southwest, but doesn't get around to the root causes until late in the story.

Today, the West’s chief water user is agriculture, with three-fourths consumed by water-gulping crops like cotton, citrus, alfalfa and vegetables. Irrigated fields around hot, dry Yuma, Ariz., produce so many winter vegetables that nearly all of your salad comes from Yuma. Irrigated fields grow countless tons of alfalfa to feed livestock, crowded into giant feedlots nearby.

So much water is sucked from the Colorado to grow crops and quench thirsts that the river’s flow into Mexico is a relative trickle.

The Southwest’s water crisis is a result of dubious policy that pushed unsustainable growth, incented by federally financed dams, reservoirs and canals that delivered water at astonishingly low cost to cities and farmers.

Requirements that states and users repay the cost of building waterworks are often waived with little notice. Just one of these giant projects, the 336-mile concrete canal moving Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, cost $4 billion to build in the 1970s ($26 billion today) and many millions to maintain. Relatively little has been repaid to taxpayers, or ever will be.

I'll probably never, ever, get people, including people who ought to know better, to stop using the terms "cost" and "price" interchangeably. We can't, for instance, speak of rising health care costs until we know something about price discovery. The same error is present in the passage above.  The costs of the water and power projects are great, but those Yuma growers see low prices for the Colorado River water they use because they are living at the expense of somebody else.  I also recall, in the middle 1970s, something called "flood watering" being a thing in Phoenix.  Yup, cover your lawn with water.  We had water meters, and even in Milwaukee there was odd-even sprinkling days, even with new water intake cribs being built as the city grew, as it still was back then.

But nobody wants to get into the implications either of understanding that water is a commodity and ought be priced accordingly, or that those fresh vegetables (and Californian cheese, for Elsie's sake!) coming to the Twin Cities in the winter look cheaper because taxpayers in the Great Lakes are helping pay for those southwestern water projects, and they might be on the hook for even more water projects.

Less than 80 years ago, North Dakota had more electoral votes than Arizona, and Phoenix was a remote outpost. Today, Arizona has more people than North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota combined. That kind of growth is evident throughout the Southwest, which means more and more members of Congress are being sent by dry states rather than by the water-rich Midwest.

The article fears those Members will vote to provide benefits to their constituents, at the expense of everyone else.

Another option is to strictly restrict water use, but that’s politically dicey and can’t get much beyond talk.

Then there’s a plan to spend gazillions to capture several of Alaska’s free-flowing rivers with a grand network of dams, canals and tunnels to divert water south to the Colorado basin. It seems that the drought is getting serious enough so that even far-fetched ideas get a look.

So OK, now what?

To desert dwellers, an idea that makes intuitive sense is to pipe Lake Superior water to where it’s “needed.” Such a project would be staggeringly expensive but technically doable; besides, the Great Lakes surely wouldn’t miss, say, 50 billion gallons — would they?

The populace all around the Lakes is rock-solid against shipping any water anywhere, and advancing any diversion plan would set off political warfare.

Or perhaps one should say “renew hostilities.” This story isn’t new. In 2007, New Mexico’s then-Gov. Bill Richardson suggested a Great Lakes diversion when the Western drought was only six years old.

Note again: "strictly restrict," presumably by quotas or peer pressure or anything but price incentives, but this is the Star Tribune, y'see.  As far as the water diversions go, that idea is much older.  I remember people in Michigan, during the 1980s restructuring of Smokestack America, seriously suggesting that Michigan finance such a pipeline.  Cooler heads prevailed.

You want war, though?  I still fear that, long before the Second Minnesota face off against the Phoenix Zouaves, the Great Lakes Compact the Star Tribune columnists figure Congress will undo will come under severe pressure within states such as Illinois and Wisconsin that have Great Lakes coastlines.

CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, VOX.

Access to clean water is a basic human right.  Yes, for anyone who has a rain barrel.  When the clean water makes use of expensive treatment plants and pipelines, it makes more sense to view it as a commodity.

Unless you write for Vox, where you can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

After World War II, America went on something of an infrastructure kick, building an expansive network of water pipes in cities across the country. But now these pipes are more than 60 years old and in many instances are in desperate need of repair.

That "infrastructure kick?" The victory dividend resource curse. Desperate need? Political spin for "this is something I want, and I want somebody else to pay for it."

That's not, however, how those European social democracies, you know, those shining examples of how to do governance right, roll.

Tracy Mehan, executive director of government affairs at [the American Water Works Association (yep, even trade associations of government agencies engage in rent-seeking)], has pushed for an increase in federal funding but says we can’t avoid higher water rates. “We’ve coasted for decades in most places around the country. Our rates are half that of northern European cities,” he said. “Rates are going up and need to go up.”

That might also encourage conservation, or perhaps migration. Look at the Vox map.  A number of "high risk tracts" where people might be losing their affordable water are in deserts, for crying out loud.

There's a concept in public utility pricing called lifeline rates, under which the first block of consumption bears a lower price than additional blocks.  Perhaps that principle, used generally, might do more to change the behavior of golf courses in Arizona or California than all the moral suasion.

WATER IS NO DIFFERENT THAN ANY OTHER COMMODITY.

Stop pretending that it is.  (Via Newmark's Door.)

Yeah, I've pointed this out before, as have others.  But people continue to ignore it, to their peril.

LIVE LONGER, PAY LESS.

An obscure radio talker called Pat LaMarche thinks that ought to be the tag line for universal Medicare.  Her reasoning:  California's proposed statewide single payer bill costs out as less than her estimate of the current cost to Californians under the muddle that existed long before the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act compounded the muddle.  Perhaps, although perhaps the Californian legislators, with the lessons of Colorado's Amendment 69 in mind, are concealing what the bill is really likely to cost Californians in taxes.  (The estimates of businesses and residents leaving California, or Colorado, don't figure in my story today, as those knock-on effects, while likely to be present, aren't what interest me.)

SOMETIMES IT'S SIMPLE.

There's no reason not to treat water like a commodity.  That concept is too charged for Californians, though, which allows Voluntary Xchange to get off the Trenchant Observation of the Day. "One of the third rails in California politics these days is pricing water reasonably. They’ll try just about everything but that." Apparently, including hiring lawn-painters, just like a previous generation of Communists.

TREAT WATER LIKE A COMMODITY.

Is it really necessary to bring in Bill Shughart to emphasize what ought be straightforward?

Water shortages seem to be complicated and mysterious, perhaps caused by population growth, climate change, or both, with no obvious solution beyond deputizing “water police” to fine people who waste water by sprinkling driveways, sidewalks, and streets, or requiring “low flow” toilets. Such approaches to water conservation treat symptoms rather than causes.

The basic problem is almost absurdly simple: water is underpriced. Consumers and businesses thus have almost no incentive to use it wisely.

And thus there are more dairy cattle in California than in Wisconsin, among other absurdities.

Farmers account for 80 percent of the nation’s total freshwater consumption. Roughly half of the more than 60 million acres of irrigated farmland across the United States relies on a method known as flood irrigation, in which fields are flooded with water. Because water for agricultural use is artificially cheap, farmers continue to grow more corn, alfalfa, rice, and other thirsty crops than otherwise, straining water resources. The biofuel industry thrives because of such subsidies.

Nuclear power uses about ten gallons of water per million Btu, while creating ethanol from corn requires a thousand gallons of water on average to generate the same amount of energy. Although nuclear-power plants consume more water than do fossil-fuel plants, they use only about one-fifth of the water required by solar-thermal farms.

Underpriced water also lets the owners of coal-fired power plants, which require large amounts of water for cooling, to delay switching to more water-efficient natural-gas turbines for generating electricity. Hydraulic fracturing of shale deposits can be done with saltwater or even carbon dioxide rather than freshwater, but artificially cheap water raises the costs of employing such alternative technologies.

I'd quibble only with the use of "artificial": market pricing, being a human institution, is artifice in the same way that more complex policies are. And perhaps the reason even college sophomores have trouble grasping the economics is that college sophomores are not yet ready for economics -- never mind that Democrat cliches are offered at about a sophomore level of understanding.

As every college sophomore knows, shortages cannot persist in a market as long as prices can adjust to equate supply and demand. During a drought or when, for any other reason, the demand for water exceeds the available supply, prices predictably rise. Price increases in turn provide incentives both for consumers to economize on water use and for suppliers to increase the amount offered for sale. Hey presto! The temporary water shortage evaporates because all market participants face the true cost of its use.

Let's stipulate "externality-free" before we get too enthusiastic about "true costs." All the same, water pricing is likely, to a first approximation, to get closer to allocative efficiency than more complicated rules can, second-best arguments notwithstanding.  Megan McArdle explains -- caveat about "artificial" still holds.

Artificially cheap water encourages people to install lush, green lawns that need lots of watering instead of native plants more appropriate to the local climate. It means they don't even look for information about the water efficiency of their fixtures and appliances. They take long showers and let the tap run while they're on the phone with Mom.  In a thousand ways, it creates demand far in excess of supply.

Having artificially goosed demand, the government then tries to curb it by mandating efficiency levels and outlawing water-hogging landscaping. Unfortunately, this doesn't work nearly as well as pricing water properly, then letting people figure out how they want to conserve it. For one thing, you can only affect large and visible targets, such as appliance manufacturers or lawns. For another, people will often try to evade your regulations -- my low-flow showerhead came with handy instructions on how to remove the flow restrictor. And, perhaps most important, you limit the potential conservation to the caps. So people have an efficient dishwasher but don't consider doing small loads by hand; they have a low-flow showerhead but don't consider taking shorter showers. In short, no one is looking for ways to conserve more than whatever you've mandated. This may be enough to temporarily manage the current crisis, but it does nothing to set California's water usage on a more sustainable path.

Sustainability, however, requires recognition of simple principles of comparative advantage and public utility pricing.

If we're truly worried about the poor, we could set some minimum amount of water that would be sold at a very cheap rate, with any excess charged at market rates to reflect the actual supply and the cost of providing it. This would be hugely unpopular with homeowners who have big lawns as well as with farmers. And perhaps the fabulous array of California produce would be reduced. But that seems like a reasonable price to pay for keeping California's reservoirs from running dry.

First sentence: that's a standard regulatory principle, offered under the rubric of lifeline, or perhaps, inverted, rates.

Third sentence: what's so fabulous about California cheeses?

One of these days I may have to tell the whole story about the time the Japanese refused to accept a United States trade display because there was some rice in it.  The way people in Michigan interpreted it was all wrong.