[yellowapple]

> At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer.

Not quite true; the farmer using that land to grow crops is externalizing an opportunity cost onto those who might use that land for something else, e.g. for the carpenter's workshop or the mechanic's garage. Same with the water consumed by those crops. With these natural and finite resources, there very much is a zero-sum game, since your use of that resource is at everyone else's expense.

This is something Graham entirely misses in his article: the wealth, contrary to his core assertion, does flow from a common source, specifically land. The wealthy, in turn, are such specifically because they happened to be the ones able to control that land at the exclusion of everyone else. This was the basis of Henry George's advocacy for a land value tax.

"But YellowApple," I can already hear, "${ARBITRARY_FAANG}'s wealth ain't tied up in real estate!" Au contraire. Their software is developed in offices that consume land. Their hardware is built in factories that consume land. Their hardware is further constructed from materials extracted from that land. It's land all the way down, and the company externalizes those opportunity costs on everyone else. That is where the injustice in their wealth lies; it is unjust for them to reap the benefits of that land without adequately compensating the rest of society for the opportunity cost the members thereof now bear.

[Turing_Machine]

> Same with the water consumed by those crops.

Every drop of water on Earth has been "consumed" many, many times over. It doesn't just get used once and then disappear.

There may be localized shortages of water (e.g., in California), but that doesn't mean that the Earth's water overall gets "used up", in any meaningful sense.

[yellowapple]

That ain't what I'm saying. Every inch of land on Earth has been "reused" many times over, too. That doesn't change the fact that there's a finite amount of it, and the possession of any quantity of it is at the expense of everyone else needing it. Same goes for water; yes, the water itself doesn't magically disappear, but of the 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers of water on this planet, if you're storing a trillion of those km³ for yourself in water tanks, that's a lot less that other people can use.

That is: as defined above, consumption ≠ destruction, but rather consumption = possession.

(This ain't even mentioning the distinction between actual potable water v. water contaminated with salt or outright toxins - and the resulting labor and energy costs of converting the latter back into the former. It also ain't even mentioning the labor and energy costs of moving water from where it's abundant to where it's scarce.)

[Turing_Machine]

>If you're storing a trillion of those km³ for yourself in water tanks

All the water tanks in the world don't add up to a trillion km³. Not by many orders of magnitude.

> the resulting labor and energy costs of converting the latter back into the former

The sun does that for free, and has done for billions of years.

[yellowapple]

> All the water tanks in the world don't add up to a trillion km³. Not by many orders of magnitude.

You're missing my point: that hoarding water is at the expense of anyone else who needs water. One milliliter, one gigaliter, doesn't matter; that's still less for everyone else unless and until it is released, and during that time the mere storage of that water externalizes an opportunity cost on everyone else needing that water.

> The sun does that for free, and has done for billions of years.

Right, because the sun magically drops all precipitation into lakes and rivers, and not a drop of it into the oceans. I'm sure the sun has some sort of tracking system that realizes which molecules of water come from where and puts them right back whence they came, right?

[Turing_Machine]

> You're missing my point: that hoarding water is at the expense of anyone else who needs water.

Someone with a water tank in (say) Seattle, Washington is not "hoarding water" "at the expense" of someone in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, because there is no practical way of getting the "hoarded" water from Washington State to Ethiopia. If the Seattleite doesn't "hoard" that water, it's going to run straight into Puget Sound. It's not going to somehow appear at a tap in Addis Ababa.

> Right, because the sun magically drops all precipitation into lakes and rivers, and not a drop of it into the oceans.

Now you're just strawmanning. Of course a lot of it falls on the oceans. But enough of it falls on land that the hydrologic cycle continues, as it has for billions of years.

I think fundamentally you're just wedded to the the idea that water gets "used up" in the same sense that, say, oil, gets used up.

It doesn't.

[yellowapple]

> Someone with a water tank in (say) Seattle, Washington is not "hoarding water" "at the expense" of someone in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,

Well it sure ain't contributing to the "hydrologic cycle" if it's in a water tank. That's a tankful less water in that cycle. And multiply that by everyone else storing water, and before you know it that's a noticeable impact globally, including both for Addis Ababa and the rest of Seattle.

This is, mind you, precisely why a lot of municipalities don't take kindly to people collecting rainfall, or to people damming up streams or rivers without doing the necessary due diligence on ecological impact assessment. There are downstream impacts to these seemingly-innocuous things.

> I think fundamentally you're just wedded to the the idea that water gets "used up" in the same sense that, say, oil, gets used up.

Nowhere have I even suggested that to be the case, and yet somehow you think I'm the one strawmanning here. If you're going to deliberately ignore my point and substitute it for one that's obviously false, then why even bother to respond?