Water usually follows gravity and flows downhill. “Water flows uphill to/toward/towards money” is a jocular saying popular where water is scarce, such as in California, Arizona and Texas. Water flow uphill to large cities in those states because the cities have the money to afford it.
 
“Water will find its own economic level” was cited in print in 1973, in a Texas publication. “Water flows uphill toward money” was cited in 1974, in a story about the Rocky Mountains. “We have always maintained that water seeks its own economic level, or as it is sometimes expressed, ‘water flows uphill to money’” was cited in 1977.
 
   
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Proceedings of the eleventh West Texas Water Conference: Texas Technological University, Lubbock, Texas, March 23, 1973
Texas Technological University, West Texas Water Institute
Lubbock, TX: Texas Technological University
1973
Pg. 2:
But, essentially, what this report does (and this is my opinion, not Mr. Burleigh’s) is to establish the basic principle that water will find its own economic level.
 
28 November 1974, Greensboro (NC) Daily News, “Rocky Mountains Getting Clutter ad Pollution” (New York Times News Service), pg. D12, col. 4:
Water, in this semi-arid region, is already in short supply. There is a saying here: water flows uphill toward money.
   
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Water Needs for the Future:
Political, economic, legal, and technological issues in a national and international framework
By Ved P Nanda; University of Denver. College of Law.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press
1977
Pg. 110:
We have always maintained that water seeks its own economic level, or as it is sometimes expressed, “water flows uphill to money.”
 
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Conflict Regulation
By Paul Ernest Wehr
Boulder, CO: Westview Press
1979
Pg. 159:
Only time water flows uphill is when there’s money upstream. — Western Slope aphorism
     
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The Great Plains:
Perspectives and Prospects
Edited by Merlin P. Lawson and Maurice E. Baker
Lincoln, NE: Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1981
Pg. 171:
Moses’s Third Law states that water seeks its own economic level, or, as it is sometimes more crudely stated, water flows uphill to money.
 
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Saving Water in a Desert City
By William Edwin Martin, et al.
Washington, DC: Resources for the Future; Baltimore, MD: Distributed by the Johns Hopkins University Press
1984
Pg. 4:
It is an old saying that water flows uphill toward money.
 
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Cadillac Desert:
The American West and Its Disappearing Water
By Marc Reisner
New York, NY: Penguin Books
1986
Pg. 13:
In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them.
 
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Water Wars:
Privatization, Pollution and Profit
By Vandana Shiva
London: Pluto Press
2002
Pg. 28:
You know the saying, “In Colorado water flows uphill, towards money.”
 
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The Quotable Rebel
By Teishan Latner
Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press
2005
Pg. 77:
Water flows uphill towards money.
Proverb from the American West.
 
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The Swamp:
The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
By Michael Grunwald
New York, NY: Simon & Schuster
2006
Pg. 288:
He often quoted Mark Twain: “Water flows uphill—towards money.”
 
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“Water flows uphill towards money.” – common saying in the American West
http://www.amazon.com/Road-River-Boy-Politics-Supersuburb/dp/0876112351 …
9:41 AM - 22 May 2014