The Dry Math of Scarcity

The Dry Math of Scarcity:
"There are two possible ways to allocate water in California:
The people in Sacramento, Governor Brown prominent among them, can pick and choose who gets what, with all of the political shenanigans, cronyism, inefficiency, and corruption that brings. 
Or Californians can get their water the same way they get most everything else they need and value: by buying it on the open market.
This is an excellent opportunity to apply the cap-and-trade model that many progressives favor when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, with an important difference:
This deals with real, physical scarcity, not artificial scarcity created by regulation.
(Incidentally, it here bears repeating that notwithstanding the inaccurate proclamations of Governor Brown and President Obama, California’s drought almost certainly is not the result of global warming; the climate models supporting the scientific consensus on global warming predict wetter winters for California, not the drier winters that have produced the current crisis. California’s climate is complex, but a great deal of it is dominated by desert and arid to semi-arid Mediterranean conditions.)
...As the economist Alex Tabarrok puts it: “California has plenty of water — just not enough to satisfy every possible use of water that people can imagine when the price is close to zero...”