Sometimes the answers to the world’s problems are difficult to find and harder to actuate, and other times they fall right out of the sky. Rain catchment, the process of installing systems to harvest rainwater for potable or non-potable use at the residential or industrial levels, falls squarely in the second category. As economist Justin Talbot and technologist Israel Mirsky pointed out, collecting rainwater has a host of benefits. Like solar power, it reduces utility bills by reducing consumption of piped-in water and replenishes the aquifers for the same reason, it helps manage the risk of floods, and it wipes out water shortages. Talbot and Mirsky even called for the US to pivot towards rain catchment to the tune of harvesting one trillion gallons of it annually. One would imagine green systems like rain catchment would have the full endorsement of the state or at least its noninterference, but this is not the case.
The Dark Side of Water Politics
The United States may be the land of the free, but paradoxically, it is also the land of the rainwater collection permit. Federal law has nothing to say about rainwater collection, so it is left to the states to decide, and many of them take an approach that is not just anti-environmental, but anti-liberty. Some states like Oregon require a special permit issued by the state for homeowners to set up rain catchment systems on their property. Other states like Utah have an entire bureaucracy of registering the rather innocuous devices and a publicly searchable database of all active permits and their addresses to boot. At the time of writing, 15 states have substantive regulations on rain catchment systems, with varying degrees of intensity.
Aside from the tangible benefits of rain catchment described earlier, the problem with regulation is its implication for liberty. One of the key aspects of private property is the owner’s monopoly on the use of said property which includes its improvement, conservation, or modification. Regulations which interfere with the homeowner’s (or with the landlord’s) ability to improve his property go squarely against his liberty and show the property is not fully his but is in fact partly socialized.
Rainwater harvesting is such an innocuous and beneficial process that state regulation on it speaks to a wider issue—the scope of the state itself. Government regulation of one obscure thing promises the same of other obscurities, like how less than half of American states allow all types of alcohol to be sold in supermarkets, how it’s illegal to have tinted car windows in New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont, or how seven states do not allow charter schools to be set up, or how Marijuana is still categorized as a schedule I substance at the federal level.
A life regulated, proscribed, prodded, and cajoled in this way is not a free one, and achieving practical liberty is nothing if not the tenacious peeling back of state control over the obscure aspects of life such as rainwater collection.
The Flip Side of Water Politics
Of course, there are some states like Delaware and Florida which go the opposite way and offer incentives to install the systems. Instead of a ban, the subsidy is a different and multi-layered problem. First, it taxes the general citizenry causing a common impoverishment, and second it bestows parochially on a favored few. Subsidies force taxpayers to pay for things that most of them will never receive and thus constitute a double invasion of their liberty, first in the taking itself, and then in spending said money on things which are not likely to benefit the individual.
At the same time, the sure effect of any subsidy is getting more of the thing itself, but this is not always economical. The determinant of any action is whether its benefits outweigh its costs or vice versa, and when the state puts its finger down on one side of the scale with subsidies, it throws off the cost-benefit calculation by making the former artificially low.
When the full costs are not borne by those who benefit, men who would otherwise be submarginal in their demand for rain catchment would opt to install the systems, a phenomenon which could be called uneconomic overproduction. The goal in any economy should not be to maximize production of X, but to produce the correct quantity of the same–The Soviet Union organized its economy on maximizing production and it paid the price for it.
More is not always better since producing X means not producing Y. Subsidies will artificially increase the amount of rain catchment, which necessarily means that less of other goods which would otherwise be produced will not be. Goods which go unproduced in this manner are the ones most valued by the market, even though rain catchment was most valued by the state. Subsidizing rain catchment would ensure the wrong amount of the good is produced and leave the taxpayers with the bill.
Having examined states disincentivizing and incentivizing rain catchment and found both approaches wanting, there is only one position remaining: To move away from water politics completely.
Moving Away From Water Politics
The approach to mirror is embodied in states like Oklahoma, Wisconsin, or Wyoming which do not have any regulations on rain catchment at all. By not taking a side for or against harvesting, these states maximize liberty by allowing all those who wish to harvest to do so, and by the same token, they do not have to tax citizens for subsidies and risk overbuilding the systems uneconomically as a result.
Only states with true regulatory neutrality respect the innate liberty of the individual to modify his property in ways suitable to him. The employment of permits, registrations, and schemes of the sort serve only to arbitrarily reduce the scope of human action, thus harming the citizen looking to install rain catchment and the employment of taxes and subsidies restrict the scope of human action for the taxpayers, and pervert the incentives of production causing needless waste. Both approaches are two sides of the same coin, neither respecting individual liberty.
Laws which debar man from such peaceable, environmentally friendly, and totally innocuous activities like harvesting rainwater have no place in a civilized society. These states must abandon their outmoded command-and-control water politics and in doing so, go green by going free.
