A Call for Reasonableness

   Recently, I wrote a letter to the local paper (Amarillo Globe News, October 25th, 2012) in response to an article about the City of Amarillo's efforts to encourage water conservation.  The article described a program with a $25,000 budget to pay a company to "make efficiency assessments of irrigation systems at homes with high water bills” (‘An intervention’ on water usage in Amarillo: Amarillo takes proactive role in conservation, Oct. 13, amarillo .com).  My letter can be read here, but my argument was and is that it's stupid to spend money on a program like this that will A) benefit only a select few, and B) do nothing to curb excessive water use.
   I think this is a perfectly reasonable argument to make.  I also believe that watering restrictions are both reasonable and prudent, especially in semi-arid climates like the Texas panhandle.  But many in this part of the world do not, and one such lunatic wrote this in the "comments" section under the letter:

I do believe that when I pay for a product or a service in U.S. currency, it belongs to me. Water included. When it hits my meter and is recorded, it is charged to me and I pay the bill. I own that water at that point. I should be able to use it in whatever manner I deem necessary regardless of your opinion about how I should use it. And water resrictions as well as most environmental concerns are just another way to control people. But you feel the government is entitled to not only charge me for water, but prescribe the best use of it. Although you'd never admit it, the goal is not simply control over the water I use, but eventual control over the population through every product we might need or want. Totalitarianism and obsessive control of the citizen's environment go hand in claw. Historically, that level of control always leads to abuse of the citizenry. And the last time I checked, the Government worked for us, not the other way around. Maybe you ought to pick on agriculture, since they use 90 percent of the water that is pumped out of the aquifer. Or maybe you should just let us all live our lives free from your concept of utopia.

   If I'm not mistaken, this is a fine example of pathological, hysterical paranoia.  This fellow, in reading my complaint about a wasteful city program that will produce little to no hoped-for effect, figures I'm Ho Chi Minh, and that watering restrictions are the surest means to a communist takeover.  If you think I'm exaggerating at this guy's expense, read his comment again.
   This sort of response is a model of what is increasingly becoming a force to contend with in this part of the country, and it's frightening.  I know where this guy is coming from, even if he's a little crazy.  The premise of his argument is a libertarian perspective.  He, like his fellow libertarians, believes that any level of government regulation is suspect, hostile, dangerous.  Never mind the fact that, as he admits "the Government work[s] for us," they are still the problem, and their aim is to own and control us.  This is the argument I encounter time and again with my libertarian friends, and frankly it's unsettling.
   Now I want to say something that I hope you will sit with, regardless of your ideological ilk.  I trust an unfettered free market about as much as I trust an unfettered government.  That is to say, I look suspiciously upon both.  The principle reason I don't trust either extreme is because human beings are involved.  Trust me when I say that an absolutely libertarian society (which is itself Utopian) would be just as totalitarian as an absolutely centralized government.  When a single, focused, absolute ideal forms a society, don't expect varied outcomes, regardless of motive.  The problem with libertarians is the same problem with idealist liberals: they want what they can't have, and don't want anything in the middle.
   So I'm making a call for reasonableness.  I'm imploring us all to step back from our absolutist opinions and become willing, if only for a little while, to consider arguments on their merits, not on our paranoia of what the arguers are after, or upon the caricatures of our counterparts we've constructed.  And I'm imploring us all to consider the possibility that we are not mortal enemies simply because we differ in opinion.  Who knows, we might even like each other if we could stop insulting one another long enough to learn why someone would believe somethings we don't personally believe.