For those of you who got a chuckle at Chuck DeVore’s ribbing of bill by Democratic Assemblyman Laird of Santa Cruz to mandate what kind of toilets private property owners install in their own homes, here’s a more serious afternote — five REPUBLICAN legislators voted FOR the bill.
I would invite "on the record" comment from Assemblymembers Sam Blakeslee, Lynn Daucher, Bill Emmerson, Tom Harman, and Shirley Horton.
Perhaps we can direct these folks to Republican Party’s platform that is pretty clear about where the GOP stands on private property rights. A state government mandate about the kind of toilet someone can put in their home may sound like a minor issue, but if government has a right to tell you the kind of toilet you use to force you to conserve water, then why not a law limiting the size of a home, to save on power bills? Or a law limiting the use of sharp knives in a home to limit potential injuries?
Water conservation is important. But there is an important free-market principle at play here. Water is a resource. If that resource becomes scarce, the price of that resource will increase. If the cost goes up enough, then the consumer may prioritize reducing the amount of the scarce resource that they consume (in the case of water, it may be shorter showers, running sprinklers at night, or, yes, installing low-volume toilets, sinks or showerheads). But we shouldn’t tinker with the free-market system at play. It’s not a perfect system, but as Ronald Reagan said, it is the closest thing to perfect you will find!
At the end of the day, one has to define what the relationship is going to be between the people and their government. On one extreme, government is so limited so at to have anarchy. But the other extreme would result in severely curtailing liberty, so important to America. This bill clearly curtails liberty.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I realize there are some exceptions, but isn’t most water used in toilets originally owned by government and shipped through government owned pipelines to the user (flusher)?
Don’t most Californians pay their water bill to a governmental agency?
As such, normal free-market issues aren’t necessarily applicable. After all, people don’t get a better jail cell just because they might have the money to pay for it.
If government wants to restrict the amount of water used by its customers when flushing a toilet, doesn’t it have that right?
The answer, of course, would be to privatize water. But where would the private water company get all that H2O needed to flush all those toilets? From government owned streams, lakes and rivers, of course. So we’re right back where we started from.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:00 am
In honor of Laird’s bill, I will be flushing all toilets in my general vicinity once an hour.
Government may have the right to restrict the amount of water used by customers when flushing a toilet, but I am pretty sure they can’t regulate how many times we can flush it…that would be discriminatory against large families, right?
I think this is just a retaliatory move because Laird is pissed that Huntington Beach beat out Santa Cruz for the rights to be called “Surf City”!!! He is just trying to punish everyone in the state for Santa Cruz’ misfortune.