>That the right to make a living comes before the right to make a killing. That fairness for the many is more important than maximizing for the few. OK, but th

>That the right to make a living comes before the right to make a killing. That fairness for the many is more important than maximizing for the few. OK, but that's not really a full accounting of the tradeoff being made. Preventing "outside" or "non-local" fishing does have the advantage of privileging local stakeholders over remote capitalists - but it also privileges local stakeholders over remote _customers_. If economies of scale allow a commercial fishing operation to cut final prices by 10%, then on the margin you're going to see about 10% more lobsters being sold, which means that 10% more people get to eat lobster than would be able to do so under this regime. And maybe that's fine! I'm not saying we shouldn't make this tradeoff. But consumer surplus is generally ignored in this kind of calculation, as if the value of the lobsters were a zero-sum game in which we split things up between Small Local Good Guys and Rapaciously Greedy Outside Capitalists, and that doesn't tell the whole story.