What a beautiful vignette of capitalism destroying the planet.

Where does capitalism enter the picture here?

They interrupted the initiative for revenue loss.

I suppose the underline here belongs under the fact that the initiative is fundamentally good for the environment, and using the water isn’t necessarily good for anyone beyond necessity. The need for revenue essentially encourages waste, if only to generate the revenue required for economic survival.

It seems to indicate that the resource should not be a commodity at all.

Private individuals didn't control the means of production. Individual profit motive exists regardless of whether that individual has been put into a socialist country or a country with more economic freedom, so it's probably best to harness that motive to create value for others. This isn't to say the government shouldn't be regulating externalities, such as pollution or limited resources in some way.

The most "anti-capitalist" country that has ever existed managed to harm the Earth more than the US [0].

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-grim-pollution-pictur_b_9...

Isn't raising the rate on something one of the main tools a well-functioning government should use to constrain that thing's use? Here they got the order backwards, which is a political and planning fiasco.

Revenue loss for a state owned entity. I still don’t get the reference to capitalism.

The state owned entity only depends so strongly on the revenue from selling water because of the capitalist system it is embedded in. If water conservation is valued then substituting that revenue in a way that doesn't waste water should be a high priority.

(I'm assuming "interrupted the initiative for revenue loss" is correct for the sake of this post. If it's not then the capitalism complaint is very weak.)

It doesn't matter what economic system you had, you'd still get the same problem which is that reducing utilisation of a service doesn't reduce the resources required to provide that service either immediately or linearly. Non capitalist systems still have costs, the resources for the water authority still need to come from somewhere and fundamentally that somewhere is the community. There are no shareholders to satisfy, no profit to pay to anyone, they're free to manage their service provision and costs in the best interests of the community.

> the same problem which is that reducing utilisation of a service doesn't reduce the resources required to provide that service either immediately or linearly.

I disagree with that being the problem. The way I see it, funding the utility via sales is the problem.

Let's say usage drops by 50% and costs drop by 10%. Under the current business model that's a disaster. Under a central funding model, hooray costs dropped!

Sure, but whether you go for a central funding model (which boils down to everybody pays regardless of use) or a user pays model, that decision has nothing to do with capitalism. In a non-capitalist system you could do either.

In fact in a capitalist model you could still do either. The utility could be privately owned but have just one customer, the government. It’s not a great idea, but it does happen.

> In a non-capitalist system you could do either.

You could but there's much less reason to pick that way.

> The utility could be privately owned but have just one customer, the government.

The government being the only customer provides it a lot of control and I would say this is an obfuscation of state ownership more than it is actually capitalism.

> they had to raise water rates because of lost revenue!

Same thing in some California water districts in previous drought. Asked for conservation, people conserved. Revenue went down so they jacked up the prices more than 4x!

The worst part is that the largest increase was done in the base rate which you pay regardless of consumption. So now the rate structure doesn't promote conservation that much since we have to pay nearly $100/mo even on zero consumption.

This is why I'll always vote against privatisation of utilities.

Weren’t those utilities public, not private?

In the US, basic utilities like power or water or gas are often handed off to a private company in a local area.

It is understood that these expensive and pervasive infrastructure projects are natural monopolies - it is much more efficient to have one provider than a competitive market. Imagine what a mess it would be if you had several sets of water pipes and power lines running through your neighborhood.

For one reason or another, local governments often let someone else manage all of that. Ostensibly, the tradeoff is that the utility company should be more heavily-regulated than a normal company would be.

But there is also some overlap between areas, and sometimes a handful of competitors are allowed to share physical infrastructure, so in practice it's more like a hodge-podge of hyperlocal oligopolies.

I don’t think you answered my question.

The problem is that infrastructure has a fixed cost, even with no usage, so in some ways it's arguable that the high fixed cost is making it so that big users aren't subsidizing everyone else.

And because people caught on that conserving doesn't really make it cost less for you, they're now instead trying to force it by issuing fines for those that don't reduce their usage.

as a fellow son of a Tucson Water employee dad I remember that period and it was the most hilarious thing. Pete the Beak was all over the place and I remember them telling us the city was 'sinking' and the need for the CAP was a solution to all the problems too! Yeah that went wonderfully - i remember my dad coming home from work one day and complaining about the CAP and the implementation and we were signing up for bottled water delivery.