“I wish to save the very wealthy men of this country… from the ruin that they would bring upon themselves
if they were permitted to have their way.” —Teddy Roosevelt, 1911
Between the national stage and the local battleground over groundwater, one common element seems ever present: the constant, unyielding pressure of moneyed people against the public’s interest in law and policy. Some of these people will say anything to convince the public that meeting their need will benefit everyone, even when they know it will not. If necessary, they will use those words to inflame us to join their cause, burning the bridges below our feet. It’s an age-old problem; it’s Biblical.
Last week I had the privilege of meeting with yet another very decent, dedicated irrigation district manager, who reinforced my appreciation for the real differences between democratically-structured irrigation districts and property-based water districts. Listening to his efforts to insist that SGMA’s legal protections be implemented, I was reminded of the struggle—la lucha—of my predecessors, particularly Paul Taylor, the professor of economics at Berkeley whose baton I received when he died.
Paul was deeply engaged in the month-to-month, year-to-year battle waged by the landed wealthy to cancel out the excess land provisions of federal Reclamation law (also known as the 160-acre limitation). He had written law journal articles rather than books, providing legally-sound published documents to support public water policy in ongoing legal battles and legislative debates. The excess land provisions were meant to enact the central purpose of the program, the reason the nation’s taxpayers had been required to fund federal reclamation projects for the western states. That purpose was to build homes and farms in arid lands, not vast estates, not agricultural empires.
Some water historians have argued that purported public purpose was nothing more than the excuse, the cover-up provided by the wealthy to con taxpayers into subsidizing their empire-building efforts. It wouldn’t be the first time. But Paul believed in that purpose and spent the last half of his life defending it. He knew it was a life-giving principle on which the nation’s democracy depends. Lack of enforcement of these provisions, however, has meant that the landed wealthy are still here to push, perverting the public water decision making process.
A phrase from my time with Paul began to surface as I contemplated what I’d heard from that irrigation district manager: “pressure vs. principle,” words in the title of one of Paul’s law journal articles. I went back to that piece and began reading it. Every sentence is carefully constructed; as I read, I mentally entered the fray in which he had fought. It’s not much different now, if at all. One point he makes is that they are relentless, those wealthy landed people: failing in one branch of government, say, the legislative, they move to the executive. If that fails, it’s on to the third branch, the courts. If that fails, it’s back to the lawmakers or the law administrators, wherever there’s an opening, and the cycle continues until they get what they want.
The article starts obliquely with the phrase “latent causes of faction,” a quotation from James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 10 (1787). In it, Madison warns the future nation to beware this chronic source of failure. Those “latent causes” are “sown in the nature of man,” he wrote, but he also clearly identified that “the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” Most of Federalist #10 describes the need for the new country to develop ways to mediate the ill effects of this faction trigger such that the rights of less wealthy people and the needs of the common good are not trampled by the apparent winners.
Perhaps “pressure vs. principle” can be rendered down even further to “private vs. public.” Regardless, it’s time we understood that pressure, the latent cause of faction and its primal trigger. When the common good is violated, when the wealthy are allowed to have their way, diminishing others’ human rights while crushing public policy and the laws of the land, even they, eventually, will pay the price. We can save them that tragedy by saving ourselves and our country from their dissembling actions.
Buckle up, friends—we’ve got work to do.
Trudy Wischemann is an ordinary person who writes about extraordinary people, places and things. Send her your extraordinary sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
