The late Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana in 1922 suffered the fate of Oregon’s Congressman Al Ullman: he was retired by the voters for proposing a national sales tax. Thereafter, he mellowed into being a scholar and biographer. In these philosophical years he wrote “You know, I’ve learned in the Widener Library at Harvard that most of what I was taught as a boy in Indiana is pure bunk.” That is also true of much of what we ordinarily read and hear about water economics and ownership. I am giving you a list of things I submit are pure bunk, or mostly so. My first points may seem radical, but stay your judgment, I have some right-wing thoughts coming “on the other hand.”
1993. In Polly Dyer (ed.), Whose Water? Past; Present; Future. Seattle: Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Washington, pp. 69-93 + 125-33.
