In drought-plagued Southern California, the comrades have ways of making you obey.

Fresh after nixing a new plan for a desalination plant to provide water to residents during these water-lean times, they'd rather target individual water-wasters at residences.  They're putting "flow restrictors" on residential taps to stomp out "water-wasters," same way Stalin's men worked to stomp out wreckers and hoarders. 

Apparently, paying higher bills for excess water use is simply not enough.  Coercion is better.

Water your lawn, get your water clamped to a trickle.

Legal Insurrection has an item on just how bad it is:

Not content with simply denying the construction of desalination plants or plowing under dams, green-justice bureaucrats in one Golden State water district are installing flow restriction devices on residences deemed to be 'wasting water'.

The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District began installing water flow restrictors Wednesday, and so far, four have been installed.

Customers who were warned and continued to use more water than was recommended are getting these installed.

Apparently, it's not "your" water even if you bought and paid for it.

The coercive intrusion is pretty amazing stuff, given that most water waste comes from the state itself, as well as Silicon Valley's tech industries, not residences.  The state not only fails to keep up its pipes, as happened near Santa Monica, but flushes billions of gallons of fresh water into the sea in the interest of protecting the non-native "delta smelt," as well as the politically connected salmon farm lobby.

Besides bad policies and skewed priorities, the state has failed to build water storage facilities from water-abundant years and failed to construct desalination plants for lean-year substitutions.  All it has left is to come for the people.

The article says four homes were slapped with these flow restrictor clamps, but twenty "water-wasters" caught watering their lawns or something similar had been identified.  Sixteen signed a paper from the state pledging their fealty to water conservation and escaped the clamp.  The four who didn't sign got the muzzles.

How much did it cost the state to surveil, search, identify, and coerce the "water-wasters" for enforcement?

This is sounding more and more like East Germany in its The Lives of Others life than anyone might have imagined.

Image: FreeSVG, public domain.