Water capitalism : the case for privatizing oceans, rivers, lakes, and aquifers / Walter E. Block and Peter L. Nelson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Water covers some 75% of the earth's surface, while land covers 25%, approximately. Yet the former accounts for less than 1% of world GDP, the latter 99% plus. Part of the reason for this imbalance is that there are more people located on land than water. But a more important explanation is that while land is privately owned, water is unowned (with the exception of a few small lakes and ponds), or governmentally owned (rivers, large lakes). This gives rise to the tragedy of the commons: when something is unowned, people have less of an incentive to care for it, preserve it, and protect it, than when they own it. As a result we have oil spills, depletion of fish stocks, threatened extinction of some species (e.g. whales), shark attacks, polluted and dried-up rivers, misallocated water, unsafe boating, piracy, and other indices of economic disarray which, if they had occurred on the land, would have been more easily identified as the result of the tragedy of the commons and/or government ownership and mismanagement. The purpose of this book is to make the case for privatization of all bodies of water, without exception. In the tragic example of the Soviet Union, the 97% of the land owned by the state accounted for 75% of the crops. On the 3% of the land privately owned, 25% of the crops were grown. The obvious mandate requires that we privatize the land, and prosper. The present volume applies this lesson, in detail, to bodies of water.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Block (economics, Loyola Univ., New Orleans) and Nelson (professional engineer) agree with the libertarian argument that privatization of water resources is the most appropriate and efficient method to allocate those resources. The authors contend that water is merely "fast-moving land" and that the homesteading mechanism used in allocating land resources is the best way to allocate water resources. The book starts in a most promising way: the authors use the writings of John Locke to create a philosophical underpinning for private ownership of water resources. The objectivity of their argument is derailed in chapter 7, however; in responding to a straw man critique of flood control, the authors write, "Who wants the incompetent and vicious creators of 'Obamacare' to have charge of flood protection?" Their method is thus revealed: they assume that the libertarian argument for private property rights is the most appropriate and go about finding examples that support this hypothesis while ignoring those that do not. At the end of the book, the authors present case studies that identify the current water rights allocation mechanism, and they then assert that the libertarian methodology would have a better outcome. Summing Up: Not recommended. --Brian J. Peterson, Central College