Cannibal Water, Part 1

Everyone loves freedom. People should be able to do whatever they want, unless it negatively impacts someone else. Being a good neighbor, kind, and respectful towards others, comes first. If you behave that way, then fine, do whatever you want. I am a libertarian at heart. Everyone should get what they want, and everyone should want what is best for everyone else. Yeah, that would be a perfect world, huh?

Property rights activists are on the other end of the spectrum--they want their own interests to come first, before everyone else. They often sound like a deadbeat dad/mom, shirking their responsibilities, doing only what they want, ignoring their impacts on others.

"The necessity of pursuing happiness is the foundation of liberty. ...The pursuit of happiness, therefore, is not merely a matter of achieving individual pleasure. That is why Alexander Hamilton and other founders referred to 'social happiness.'" (Hamilton, 2008)

"The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty."

I'm not saying there is no place for private property, just that it needs to be managed in a way that benefits society. Private property is a tool, and if an individual's use of that tool isn't benefiting society (or at a minimum it shouldn't be harming society), then they are misusing their rights by failing to uphold their responsibilities. Misused tools (or toys) should be taken away--any parent gets this concept. The same argument can be made for guns, driver's licenses, articles of incorporation, etc.

Of course, as our knowledge of ecosystems improves over time, we need to update practices that were once thought harmless, but are found to be harmful. One example is riverbank management, where riparian landowners build too close to rivers and streams, riprap their banks and build levees, remove vegetation and large woody debris--disregarding the negative geomorphic, biological, and flooding effects on the river and their neighbors. Now, many of these degraded riverbanks are on properties where riparian rights to divert water are exercised. That is an example of someone insisting on exercising their riparian rights, but shirking their riparian responsibilities. I have a great idea that might solve this problem. The State Water Board should set minimum standards for riverbank habitat quality and quantity (a public trust resource), and for landowners failing to meet those standards, the Board should reduce their riparian water rights over time proportionally. This would incentivize maintenance and restoration of quality habitat along rivers and streams. Those complying with minimum standards would get to keep their water right. It seems like this might work, but there would need to be some studies and modeling to identify if it would work, where it might work, and how best to implement it (including what the standards should be). This idea really isn't doing anything more than what air and water pollution control regulations are doing, or the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act does--if you are doing something negatively impacting others beyond certain thresholds, you need to stop. If you manage things appropriately, you get to continue. Free market economists should love this idea--it is just internalizing externalities. As we know, free markets require strong regulations, or else they self-destruct.

And the concept of self-destruction brings me to an analogy. Imagine a ship at sea that needs to do something specific and quickly to survive. It could be speeding up, slowing down, or changing course. And that ship has good people running the different parts of it--the bridge, the engine room, the galley.

Now suppose the person running the galley gets to be in charge of the ship. They naturally have a special interest in the galley, and the galley flourishes under their leadership. Unfortunately, the engine room gets neglected, and the ship begins to lose its ability to sail out of its dire situation. Then that person leaves, and a new captain is hired--one whose expertise is in building dining rooms. Attention and huge sums of money are focused on renovating the galley. Other measures that distract from the critical situation are prioritized. The captain doesn't listen to his experts. Under the captain's authoritarian and impulsive leadership, staff turnover is great, institutional memory and capacity for implementing the core mission are lost, and all the parts of the ship begin to suffer. The ability to avoid the calamity is lost. The ship goes down--but with the fanciest dining room you've ever seen.

Now that brings me to cannibal water, and systems that destroy themselves. More about that in Part 2 of this blog post.