As anticipated, much of the response to my piece on California’s drought goes roughly: “You can’t use market prices for water! Water is a fundamental human necessity! You can’t treat it like just another commodity.”

Thought experiment:

You have ten people in the desert and 1,000 gallons of water. There are many ways you could divide that: You could let people fight over it, you could let them trade for it, etc.

But you know that after a while, that 1,000 gallons is not going to be enough for ten people. So your ten people form a legislature, and that legislature passes a law declaring water a fundamental human right, and mandating a minimum allowance of 500 gallons of water for each of the ten people in your community.

So, 500 times 10. How much water do you have?

Answer: You still have 1,000 gallons, doofus.

Scarcity is real, and declaring a scarce commodity a fundamental human right is meaningless insofar as it does nothing to change the supply of that scarce commodity.

Of course California is going to ration water. It rations iPhones and cabernet already, and nobody seems much inconvenienced by that, because there are intelligent ways to ration goods (markets) and dumb ways to ration goods (Governor Brown et al.).

But politicians cannot simply command more water into existence. There are fiat currencies, but there aren’t any fiat commodities.