This land is my land, but the rain isn’t…

In Colorado (among other western states) you do not own the water that falls out of the sky onto your own property. An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal discusses Colorado’s water law, which some lawmakers want to change, that divvies up water even before it hits the ground.

Now, this is not a new issue out west, though it sounds more than a little strange to someone (like myself) in the northeast. I was struck however by the statement in the article that water is distributed “[U]nder a seniority system based on first-come first-serve claims staked out as far back as the 1850s.” Apparently this developed in part as an outgrowth of customs developed by early prospectors (see here for a brief discussion of the appropriation system).

But, one has to question the rationality of dividing water rights according to claims dating back more than a century. Further, the idea of “first come, first serve” may be rational in certain contexts, like a gold rush, but I have serious doubts that modern water rights are one of them.