> Or just raise the price of water to a market level and let things work themselves out.
This doesn't work well for something which is required to support life and a scarce resource.
The result would be that the very rich still continue to water their acre of front lawn, wasting a lot of water on something nonproductive because money is not an issue. Meanwhile poor and middle class people get priced out of being able to afford basic usage of water to live.
progressive water rates. Figure out a decent figure for a person to live on in a decent manner (say 100 gallons, or whatever), then make that 100 gallons super cheap, but go above that and it rapidly gets expensive.
Set the top marginal prices high and use all that money the rich people with mansions are paying to build up a bunch of infrastructure to go get more water.
Today's major consumers, on the other hand, don't present a way to capture the revenue like that, while still using the water in ways that are still nonproductive from a "why do we have to do this here" standpoint.
On the contrary, it works very well indeed, and far better than a centrally planned "equitable" allocation system. Such a system is the very reason we're in the pickle we're in!
> This doesn't work well for something which is required to support life and a scarce resource.
Actually free markets do very well for that. Free market farming in the US in 1800 was the first economy to provide a consistent food surplus.
As a counter-example, no country or society has ever managed to feed itself with collective agriculture. They always wind up starving and eating each other.
This doesn't work well for something which is required to support life and a scarce resource.
The result would be that the very rich still continue to water their acre of front lawn, wasting a lot of water on something nonproductive because money is not an issue. Meanwhile poor and middle class people get priced out of being able to afford basic usage of water to live.