Toilet Talk

Or am I supposed to say lavatory? I can never remember which way around that U and Non-U thing goes.

Anyway, we have further, if it were ever needed, evidence that those who rule us are talking sh....umm, no, you fill that bit in.

Single-flush lavatories could be phased out under proposals to be announced today by a group of MPs.

The All-Party Parliamentary Water Group, led by the former environment minister Elliot Morley, warns that the country's use of water is unsustainable.

It calls for action to tackle the problem, including the fitting of water meters in homes and the phasing out of inefficient products. The recommendation has led to speculation that the power shower may be targeted in future.

Their error here goes all the way back to Garrett Hardin and his delineation of Commons problems in 1968. When the demand for a resource under free access rules ("Marxian" in the jargon) outstrips the supply of said resource then you have to impose limitations upon said use.

Simple enough so far. You can also divide possible solutions into two classes: social (or socialist) and private (or capitalist, all being Hardin's descriptions).

In other words, you can make regulations about who can use what to do what, or you can allocate property rights and use prices and markets to do the same thing.

 Which will work better in any specific case depends upon the attributes of the resource we're discussing: I'm not sure that there's all that much support for the idea that orphans should be sold to the highest bidder for them to use or abuse as they wish, so perhaps that's one where regulation is better, although the detail of the regulations then become important.

But there are other areas where property rights and markets are clearly better: the insane mockery of the Common Fisheries Policy and the success of property based systems in other countries shows that we're on the wrong path using regulation here.

But this still leaves us with our water problem. Should demand being higher than supply at current prices be best dealt with by regulation upon the size of cisterns or by the price of the water that flows through the meters?

I might prefer to use price: if people are prepared to pay for a power shower or a single flush lavatory well, good luck to them. We're not in fact "short" of water in the UK: we're short of the infrastructure to collect and distribute what already falls from the skies. Raising prices will both make people more aware of what they're using, thus curbing some demand and raise the funds to increase the supply.

Others will insist that the poor litle baa-lambs that are the general public must be banned from being able to flush away the results of their gustatory excesses.

But that isn't what makes this report so stupid. The inanity is that they insist upon doing both when either one, unsupported by the other, will achieve the desired goal.

Both politics and economics are really about making choices and that's precisely what our highly remunerated MPs have failed to do here.

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