The Doctrine Mr. Puri Is Selling the Country Is the Doctrine I Run

Consuela is a hand in the cold room at the spring-water bottling plant I own outside Salida, Colorado. She’s 41. Her fingers have been in 34-degree water 9 hours a shift for 11 years because the heated glove liner I didn’t order costs $18.00 and the $18.00 is mine to keep. My margin on the bottle in your refrigerator is $0.07. The 12,000 bottles a day I run are 12,000 cold-room minutes I bought from her. You paid $1.29 at the gas station. The $1.29 is yours. The $0.07 is mine. The $18.00 is hers. The doctrine begins.

Mr. Puri writes in National Review this morning that data centers use 17.4 billion gallons a year, that 41.3% of the country’s withdrawals are agriculture, that three-quarters of the Colorado River is alfalfa, and that the cure is a market in water rights. He’s welcome to his market. He’s describing my senior appropriator’s rights as the inefficiency to be priced out. The senior right I’m filing on the spring dates to 1887, before Phoenix had a water department. Mr. Puri wants Phoenix to bid against me. Phoenix doesn’t have my $0.07 a bottle. Phoenix has houses.

Let me put the numbers where you can see them.

I run 12,000 bottles a shift at a $0.07 margin. That’s $840 a shift, $5,040 a week, $262,080 a year in margin before the line stops. The PET bottle costs $0.09. The cap costs $0.02. The label costs $0.03. The truck costs $0.11. The diesel costs $0.04. The glove liner costs $0.0015. I have priced every line item except the glove liner. The glove liner does not appear in the math. I have priced Consuela’s fingers into the math at $0.00 a pair.

Read the next sentence twice.

The doctrine Mr. Puri is asking the country to install is the doctrine I have been running since 1887. Prior appropriation does not price water to its highest use. Prior appropriation prices water to its first use. The first use, on the senior right, is mine. The first use is a 41-year-old woman with 34-degree hands. The market Mr. Puri imagines would, in a dry year, pay me not to bottle. The market Mr. Puri imagines would pay Phoenix to bid. Phoenix cannot outbid the spring and the alfalfa fields. Phoenix will lose. The market Mr. Puri imagines is my hedge fund.

The senior appropriator in 1887 paid $4 an acre. The senior appropriator in 2026 paid $1.4 million and runs the line at $262,080 a year. The arithmetic is the arithmetic. The country is the appropriation.

The spring is one face of the doctrine. Move 600 miles and change the crop.

Leticia is a body on the swather I run outside Blythe, California. She’s 47. The cab I didn’t order has the air conditioning I didn’t authorize. She cuts 38 acres a shift because the sickle I sharpened costs $1.40 a foot and I’d rather she sweat. The heat warning was posted Tuesday. She’ll work through it. The water I sell her costs $2.50 a bottle, deducted from a wage of $17.20 an hour. The bale she stacks weighs 220 pounds. My margin on the bale is $0.014 a pound. She’ll stack 220 bales before sundown. The bale is the feed that becomes the burger you ate last Tuesday. The bale leaves my yard at $314 a ton. The bale goes to a dairy on the Saudi peninsula. The dairy sells the milk to a firm that sells the formula to a country I have not visited. I have not priced what they charge the mother.

Now do the second set of numbers where you can see them.

The senior water right I hold on the Colorado gives me 1,460 acre-feet a year at the delivery rate of $27 an acre-foot. The hay I sell is water I extracted and baled. The margin is the distance between $27 and $314. The distance is the only thing I own. I am not a beneficiary of the prior appropriation doctrine. I am the prior appropriation doctrine. I buy the failed hay farmer’s senior right when his son moves to Phoenix. I lease the right back to him at a rate that takes his profit. I hold the paper. When the basin closes. And it will. I am the one with water to sell. Mr. Puri thinks he’s describing a system. He’s describing my floor plan.

“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” — Amos 5:24

Amos was a herdsman in the eighth century before our era. He watched water run to the man with the deeper well. He called it justice. The calling is older than the Colorado River Compact. The calling is older than the doctrine of prior appropriation. The calling is older than me. The calling is me.

I am not unusual. I am a curriculum. The twenty-eight students I graduated from Warden University’s College of Business in May are at desks in Phoenix, in Denver, in Sacramento, pricing senior rights for funds you’ve never heard of. They write options on water the way I write options on water. One of them priced the rate on your suburb’s municipal utility last quarter. He graduated third in his class. I’m proud of him. The best of them run the subtraction faster than I do. By their fruits ye shall know them. Mine are dividends.

The view you find monstrous is the median view of the people who run the firms that set your water bill, and I know that because I graded them into it.

Widen the frame with me.

The Colorado River Compact of 1922 divided a river that was not what they thought it was. Every year since, the river has been a smaller version of itself. Every year since, the senior rights have been a larger claim on the smaller river. Every year since, I have been a larger man. The compact did not foresee me. The compact did not need to foresee me. I am what the compact is FOR. The next compact, when they write it, will be written for me. They will call it adaptation.

I’m told the dry-year projection at 2035 has a curve. I haven’t opened the file. The bottle is on the truck. The bale is on the boat. The spring runs through Consuela’s hands at 34 degrees. The river runs through Leticia’s hay at $314 a ton. Mr. Puri is welcome to his market. The market is mine. The 34 degrees is Consuela’s. The hay is Leticia’s. The doctrine runs.

Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.