As Groundwater Dwindles, a Food Shock Looms
When people use a resource, they should pay more than just the cost of extracting it.  They should also pay for its underlying value, which bears some relation to the price you would pay if the resource were no longer available.<p>Such prices would signal to users the actual scarcity of the resource, giving them incentive to reduce waste and find alternatives.  It would also spur development of desalination and other technologies.<p>That is one reason public ownership of a resource doesn&#x27;t work very well.  And shared private ownership doesn&#x27;t either, if you can use as much as you want.  These aren&#x27;t really different.  Just the size of the group.<p>But both could work if everybody pays a market price for what they use and owners&#x2F;taxpayers get paid for their share of what is used.