[michaelt]

  Water is a resource with a price, just like
  land or gasoline.

I don't know about South Carolina, but as I understand it in the west of America this isn't the case, as the heaviest water users are subsidised by taxpayers.

For example, in California alfalfa growers pay $70 for an acre-foot of water, while urban users in Los Angeles pay $1,000 per acre-foot. The growers use 34.1 million acre-feet a year, while urban use totals 8.9 million acre-feet a year.

Needless to say, growers get very rich from this and make big political contributions; if they had to pay market rate they'd all be out of business pretty quickly. The political contributions work; voters widely support this baffling state of affairs.

[mikeash]

It still has a price. It just happens that the price is artificially low. That's why the comment you quoted said the price should be increased in this case.

[StephenConnell]

California is a big state. Los Angeles is in a desert portion of the state. I have not researched where alfalfa is primarily grown but that is important information. You can see alfalfa test plots on this map are not in desert portions of the state. You can also see how much of the state is not a desert. http://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/-images/variety_map.gif

Buying in bulk is different than buying just enough to drink. A bottle of water for $5 at a movie for example.

Maybe the price of water in LA primarily covers infrastructure, not water. Their water does come from hundreds of miles away.

[setpatchaddress]

Nope. The water is largely coming through the same gross infrastructure. That map is not an accurate guide to regions of the state where arable water is directly available.

Water issues in the west are complicated.

[sandworm101]

Slightly different products. Water made available to a farmer, as in the farmer is allowed to pump it out of a local river, is different than clean and sanitized water delivered on demand through the tap in your downtown loft kitchen. The bottled water sold to passengers at 30,000 feet over the pacific en route to Japan is also a fundamentally different product. Water pricing is all about time and place, not necessarily volume.