What we should do is stop messing around with these pointless and absurd regulations that make bureaucrats and the poorly informed feel good but do little to address the problem of scarce water. Instead, we should simply charge more for water during droughts.

It's not clear to me why this simple solution is beyond the capabilities of the government of the great state of California, but apparently it is.

The great analogy is to imagine that we're all standing around a bathtub with blindfold on, each with our own straw drinking our of the bathtub. We can't see how many others are drinking, we can see how big their straws are, and we have no idea how big the bathtub is and how quickly it's being refilled. We have people telling us this, and to suck less hard, but you can't individually take control of this situation. Legislation and state gonvernment intervention is the only solution to this problem, and they need to act boldly and aggressively.

Raising prices to a commodity that we can't do without only means that the rich get lawns and the poor stop bathing. Start pricing water for farmland like they do for urban areas, and that will be a real change.

Water costs about half a cent per gallon at the moment. If we doubled the price of water, the poor would have to pay an entire cent per gallon. Imagine the deprivation and suffering that would result!

Most of the problem here is that water is far too cheap, at least for certain favored classes (like farmers).