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I get a kick out of these consecutive sentences: > the company’s ... continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken f

• anigbrowl 17y ago
  Ah, it's a private company that does all the fishing and books all the profit. As in, catches 90% of the fish. Apparently they don't need any special license to do this. Your point was...?
  • kingkongreveng_ 17y ago
    Is it really going over your head that the issue here is the fishing rights are public? Tragedy of the commons, all that?
    • anigbrowl 17y ago
      You're right. What we really need to do here is grant a monopoly, which will solve the problem immediately. Then we can move on to privatizing the air and things like that.
      • hugh_ 17y ago
        Interestingly, if air were in danger of being over-breathed then privatization would be the best solution. The only reason we don't have a tragedy of the commons in the air is that there's an awful lot of it and nobody has anything to gain by breathing a hundred times more.
    • hristov 17y ago
      How can it be a tragedy of the commons if only one person does it?
      • randallsquared 17y ago
        The tragedy of the commons is not about how many people abuse the commons, but about the fact that the commons is abusable precisely because there are no property rights in it. The obvious solution is for fish farms to start raising Omega-3 production, but the fact that the fish in the ocean are unowned means it's still cheaper to overfish, and the only time that won't be true is immediately before the ecological disaster (assuming it is one) of menhaden extinction.
        • raffael 17y ago
          1. the solution to a tragedy of the commons is not always to privatize the common resource. Private firms have historically continued to harvest their privately held resource until gone (e.g., privately held old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest) because they can use the resource (the land the forest once grew on) in some other profitable way. As long as there continues to be some means of profit from the resource (in forestry, replanted pine tree farms for wood pulp where formerly redwood was harvested; in fisheries, aquaculture or harvest of other species) there is little or no incentive for the private firm to preserve the original resource. Here, with menhaden, as long as the private firm can continue to harvest something profitable they will have no incentive not to overfish the menhaden till the stock collapses. The reason is simple; the resource that is publicly beneficial is live menhaden, filtering the water by consuming algae. The resource that is privately beneficial is dead menhaden, pressed for oil and ground for animal feed. This is why public protection is sometimes necessary; because the public good cannot always be made to coincide with private profitability. 2. Fish farming is unlikely to be the answer for the simple reason that farm raised fish are not fed a diet consisting mostly of algae (the primary source of the sought after omega-3 fatty acids). Farm raised fish are, as a result, lower in these beneficial fats than their wild counterparts.
          • randallsquared 17y ago
  • gojomo 17y ago
    It's possible the stocks would be better protected if Omega Protein were sold exclusive 100% rights in perpetuity.
    • camccann 17y ago
      Because obviously, left to their own devices, businesses generally won't make terrible long-term decisions to gain short-term profits. Especially when decision-makers have no long-term obligations and are smart enough to cash out before problems become apparent.
      • robotrout 17y ago
        No, there's a different reason. The "tragedy of the commons", sort of deal. Freakonomics talks about it. It would be better (according to the book, to the best of my memory), to legalize ivory and elephant ranching, as it provides people with actual, personal, benefit into insuring elephant survival. If they're MY elephants, I take care of them. If they're NOBODY's elephants, I talk a lot at parties about how "somebody should save the elephants", but then I forget about it. I think the parents argument was similar.
        • hyperbovine 17y ago
          This line of thinking turns on the assumption that people are rational. Obviously it would be stupid to destroy something that gives you an infinite stream of income (in most cases; I have seen it demonstrated that this is actually the most profitable option in some cases.) Take away rationality and the whole argument falls on its face. And there is plenty of evidence that humans are myopic, irrational beings. So I would be extremely reluctant to fork over elephants, whales or pretty much anything to a capitalist. Starting with Kahneman and Tversky, a lot (most?) of interesting work in economics over the last 30 years has been in revising the standard rational actor model to incorporate all of the irrationalities which are reliably exhibited by we homo sapiens.
          • robotrout 17y ago
  • Confusion 17y ago
    His point was that fishing rights aren't privatized: any company, or individual, could step in and compete. Your point is that a single company should not be allowed to abuse its fishing rights. You two are talking about different things and are missing each others' point.
• ghshephard 17y ago
  Agreed - I read that sentence and asked myself "How are they privatizing federal waters? Fences? Guard Boats? Exclusive Fishing Licenses?" It read like the resource was still public. I wonder though, if we can consider it a "Tragedy of the Commons" when a single player is doing most of the (alleged) damage to this resource.