California is rich. Even in the midst of a drought, we have lots of water, and in the midst of a recession, we have lots of money. The problem is one of distribution, not of actual scarcity.

This is the usual problem of the U.S., which is not just the richest and most powerful nation on Earth now but on Earth ever, and is one of the most blessed in terms of natural resources. We just collectively make loopy decisions about how to distribute the money and water, and we could make other decisions.

Take water. My friend Derek Hitchcock, a biologist working to restore the Yuba River, likes to say that California is still a place of abundance. He recently showed me a Pacific Institute report and other documents showing that about 80 percent of the state’s water goes to agriculture, not to people, and half of that goes to four crops — cotton, rice, alfalfa and pasturage — that produce less than 1 percent of the state’s wealth. Forty percent of the state’s water. Less than 1 percent of its income.

Americans usually have fantastic visions of where our resources come from and go. A lot of Americans seem to believe that the federal government spends tons of money, rather than a small percentage of the federal budget, on the arts and foreign aid; but, in fact, about one-half of discretionary spending goes to the military — the largest and most expensive military the world has ever seen.

In discussing the national financial crisis, the military was never really on the chopping block, even though its budget could, with a little paring, provide health care, education, environmental restoration, some cool climate-change adaptation and all the other pieces of a good society and a great nation. Do we really need several hundred military bases in more than 125 countries? And all those expensive toys? And the research programs to do things like weaponize insects? Do we need them more than we need to keep children healthy?

We have enough in this nation to feed, clothe, shelter, educate and provide medical care to everyone. If the will was there.

Take California’s budget crisis. A British newspaper recently ran a rather melodramatic piece about California as a failed state and compared us to Iceland. It was a wacky comparison. Iceland went bankrupt because its bankers spent lots of money they didn’t have. California is in conniptions because it has lots of money it won’t spend.

I’m not talking about raising individual taxes.

Look at corporate taxes! According to the nonpartisan California Budget Project, if we taxed corporations the way we did in 1981, we would have

$8.4 billion more coming in. That would wipe out more than one-third of the budget shortfall.

California is home to the fifth-largest corporation in the world, Chevron, whose profits were $24 billion in 2008. Chevron has lobbied to keep corporate taxes low and to avoid paying a tax on the oil taken out of the ground. Texas charges one, but we don’t.

Examine the way that we changed corporate income tax policy in the crisis years of 2008-2009 to give a small number of corporations tens of millions of dollars a year in tax breaks — $33.1 million apiece, on average, for nine corporations; $23.5 million to six others, according to the California Budget Project. There’s money there, ripe for the picking, and powerful forces to prevent that from ever happening.

Turning California into a Third World nation where the environment is neglected, a lot of people are genuinely desperate and a lot of the young have a hard time getting an education or just can’t get one doesn’t benefit anyone.

We’re not poor in money or water. We’ve just chosen to allocate them in ways that benefit tiny minorities at the expense of the rest of us. We should at least have a conversation about how we distribute our abundant resources.

Derek is right: California is a place of abundance, except when it comes to political sense.

(Solnit is the author of “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.” This essay first appeared in Los Angeles Times.)