Not quite. Western states and Alaska use “prior allocation” law, which means the first person to put the water to beneficial use (beneficial being defined differently in every single state, but generally speaking it means something a wealthy male of European descent likes doing, or anything Native Americans aren’t doing).
The Eastern USA mostly has riparian law, which is pretty fair if you are OK with individual property ownership and all it implies. Water isn’t scarce in the East, so nobody bothered setting up a crooked system to steal it from the Indians.
I have slightly more than vague comprehension already, but I’d be happy to learn more.
That would be both a free and fair market, and if there’s one thing our Democratic and Republican overlords hate more than each other, it’s a free and fair marketplace, although generally it’s the Republicans that hate fair and the Democrats that hate free. You hippies need to give up on these unworkable pie-in-the-sky solutions, and settle for the lesser evil. The tasty, tasty nuts of lesser evil.
I should probably put sarcasm tags around those last two lines, Poe’s law and all…
