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Imbued in your statement is an even more difficult knot to undo. "Tragedy of the Commons" is caused by the very existence of the modern state. Common land = pu

by _red 9y ago

Imbued in your statement is an even more difficult knot to undo. "Tragedy of the Commons" is caused by the very existence of the modern state. Common land = public land. In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land. You producing pollution on your land that negatively affected mine would result in a lawsuit. It is really the very existence of the legal-fiction of "public land" (ie. land that everyone owns), which gives rise to many of the real environmental abuses. *typo

titzer 9y ago
Well, American Indians and probably most of the indigenous peoples of the Earth would thoroughly and fundamentally disagree that the invented concept is "public land", but rather "private land". In a world where corporations buy land, pillage all of its natural resources, then sell off a smoking crater, the loser is always the environment, as corporations and people downcycle real estate constantly, extracting their profits, destroying what was there before, dodging externalities, and then often defrauding the next investor. Look what was there before and what is left over after the whole cycle. It's shit. You should take a look at the forests of New Zealand and the movement to make logging on public lands illegal.
- golergka 9y ago
  If you're talking about the pre-colonization state of these cultures, they would disagree with a lot of concepts we use now. For example, zero and negative numbers. Does it mean that zero and negative numbers are morally bankrupt?
  - titzer 9y ago
    The universe is amoral and mathematics doubly so, but the OP was talking about how the "invented concept" of public land gives rise to this tragedy of the commons. I am directly disagreeing in that A.) public land is the invented concept (it isn't, private land is) B.) public land is where the tragedy of the commons occurs (it isn't always, as tragedy happens on private lands, perhaps moreso). I can give more examples of B.) where corporations visit environmental destruction on lands they own (e.g. gold mines) and then sell off the leftover, ruined real estate, having still profited handsomely in the end.
lmm 9y ago
> Imbued in your statement is an even more difficult knot to undo. "Tragedy of the Commons" is caused by the very existence of the modern state. > Common land = public land. In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land. The state is the entity that owns all land - prior to states land was simply not owned - and state organs like the EPA are the advocates who care deeply about the environmental quality of public land. You can't address environmental issues on a smaller scale - indeed even individual states are too small a scale be able to address inherently global problems like CO2 emissions. Any "private" owner of the entire planet, or even of a large enough region to address issues like fishery management or water table pollution, would have to function like a state and share the same problems (e.g. lack of competing alternatives).
- _red 9y ago
  >The state is the entity that owns all land Who owns the state?
  - orf 9y ago
    The people, 'the commons'
    - isostatic 9y ago
      Everyone has 1 non-transferable share
netrus 9y ago
Hm, that doesn't sound very convincing to me. When I fly over Germany, it appears to me that actually almost every land is owned by people that are affected by the environment a lot: Farmers. Furthermore, air polution is one of the biggest environmental concerns right now, and air does not care about land ownership - city people are affected by bad air, but how would their situtation be better without the modern state and common land? If i'd own the river flowing by a big plant, would I care more about it's preservation than the polution-fee I could take from the company owner? One last point: you call public land a legal-fiction - that's interesting, because I would call property rights a legal fiction, and "public ownership" the natural state of stuff (one could argue every legal concept is fiction, I'd tend to agree with that).
- _red 9y ago
  >because I would call property rights a legal fiction Nearly every culture that has ever existed has recognized that someone taking something from you by force is crime. Its a normative expectation for nearly 100% of all humans. People like yourself, who don't see a value in others property (ie. think you are free to take it), are generally seen as very dangerous and inconsiderate people.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Property Rights aren't an inherent part of nature just because humans like to be greedy. Property Rights exist, at best, as part of a human narrative that we have some interest in designating a legal owner for a piece of dirt. Without humans, the dirt is not owned. With humans, we say we own the dirt (but there is no actual, objective ownership). >People like yourself, who don't see a value in others property I don't think GP made that point, rather that until Humans come along, no ownership, ie, public ownership, is the default. The land is owned by nobody until someone buys it. This can be shown with an example; Mars. Who, at this current moment, owns mars? All the dirt on mars must, by your argument, be owned by someone.
    - golergka 9y ago
      > Property Rights aren't an inherent part of nature just because humans like to be greedy. Property rights are the first level of abstraction above the physical layer of "might is right". "Public" land is usually a higher level of abstraction, because it almost always still limits who is the public: even indigenous people usually mean "public" land as land of our tribe, not their tribe.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
In this truly private system, who owns the river that runs through the parcel of land? Who owns the fish that swim upstream from the ocean to spawn every year? Who owns the air? What organisation decides who wins when the factory in one parcel of land upstream pumps poison into the water and the air. Who judges exactly how much monetary damages are due from destroying an ecosystem? None of this libertarian fantasy is remotely feasible, even after you assume that you can assign property rights to every molecule of the earth and have to sign contracts to take a breath.
- golergka 9y ago
  No fantasy that takes an ideology and tries to implement it without any nuance and compromise with reality is feasible, period. Libertarianism and anti-statism are usually quite more nuanced than their typical strawmen, and many libertarians are OK with small state which would be in charge of law enforcement. However, such small state still has no reason to own any land (except for government buildings) or designate any land as "public".
  - tpush 9y ago
    > However, such small state still has no reason to own any land (except for government buildings) or designate any land as "public" You didn't address ZeroGravitas' first paragraph; how would you solve these issues?
  - vidarh 9y ago
    The original libertarian explicitly argued for public ownership of almost everything: Joseph Dejacques, in the first use of the word libertarian, used it to chastise Proudhon as being "just" a "moderate anarchist" and "liberal" rather than libertarian over his views on women, but then went on to rail against the limitations on humanity, including property, setting his views strongly apart from Proudhon by going much further, and in particularly by denouncing property much stronger than even Proudhon's "property is theft" [1]: > Be then frankly an entire anarchist and not a quarter anarchist, an eighth anarchist, or one-sixteenth anarchist, as one is a one-fourth, one-eighth or one-sixteenth partner in trade. Go beyond the abolition of contract to the abolition not only of the sword and of capital, but also of property and of authority in all its forms. Then you will have arrived at the anarchist community; that is to say, the social state where each one is free to produce or consume according to his will or his fancy without controlling, or being controlled by any other person whatever; where the balance of production and consumption is established naturally, no longer by the restrictive laws and arbitrary force of others, but by the free exercise of industry prompted by the needs and desires of each individual. The sea of humanity needs no dikes. Give its tides full sweep and each day they will find their level. The argument against public ownership came first about a century after libertarianism was first conceived, with the rise of right-wing libertarianism, which took left wing libertarianism and turned it pretty much upside down by adding a focus on property right enforcement which is in direct opposition to the original principles of libertarianism. A key point of Dejacques original libertarianism was the view that enforcement of property rights pretty much inherently deprives the public of liberty by using the state to add restraints on people that take away far more liberty than they grant. Having grown up in Norway - one of a few countries with extensive freedom to roam [2] - I will tell you that nobody can convince me that strict enforcement of property rights is anything but theft from the public; once you are used to it, you feel the loss of that freedom deeply when you go elsewhere and are quite literally fenced in in situations where you'd previously be used to be able to roam free. [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-the-human-being-male-and-female https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam
iainmerrick 9y ago
"Tragedy of the Commons" is caused by the very existence of the modern state. No, you have it backwards. The "tragedy" was a fiction invented to justify the Acts of Enclosure in the UK, wherein public land (commons) was fenced off for sole use by the local lords. Here's a good explanation: http://www.monbiot.com/1994/01/01/the-tragedy-of-enclosure/ http://www.monbiot.com/1994/01/01/the-tragedy-of-enclosure/ In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land. OK, here are two counterpoints: First, if land is held in common, everybody has a share of ownership, including people who actually live there and therefore really do care deeply about the environmental quality. Second, just look at the recent stories about Toys'R'Us. It was purchased in a leveraged buyout in 2005 -- meaning the buyers paid relatively little and the company was saddled with a massive debt. By your argument, wouldn't those new owners care deeply about the long-term health of the company? Instead they extracted as much cash as possible and left behind a bankrupt shell. I think the analogy to private land is pretty clear.
- crimsonalucard 9y ago
  Your article says Hardins theory only works if their is no such thing as ownership. A commons is a piece of land supposedly used commonly and not owned by anyone. So Hardins theory is addressing tthings like the ocean and the air. This article might as well be rebutting the theory of gravity because it only applies to objects with mass.
  - iainmerrick 9y ago
    So Hardins theory is addressing tthings like the ocean and the air. No, Hardin himself intended his theory to address land usage; it's this article that argues the theory doesn't actually work properly in that context.
    - crimsonalucard 9y ago
      iainmerrick. You are completely and utterly incorrect. Read hardins original article. Hardin is addressing Everything that is "common." I can prove it to you. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full This is the original article by Hardin. Ctrl-F oceans. Then Ctrl-F pollution. You will see that Hardin directly references pollution and oceans as commons. If you read the entire article you will see that he talks about population control more than he talks about land.
vidarh 9y ago
> every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land. Commodore Business Machines for several decades had their plant in Westchester, PA, leak assorted chemical related to their chip manufacturing. When this was identified, they started some improvement work, but didn't fix the problem. The site was eventually sold to a company that bought it knowing it was contaminated, who continued to operate a chip manufacturing business there, until the demanded improvements made it impossible for them to operate. Despite corporate ownership for years, nobody advocated or cared very deeply about the environmental quality of this land until they were forced to by the EPA, because it did not affect their business. Other people nearby would largely have remained unaffected for many years too, until chemicals started seeping out, at which point Commodore was in decline and eventually went bankrupt. Here's one of the documents regarding this site: https://semspub.epa.gov/work/03/50245.pdf https://semspub.epa.gov/work/03/50245.pdf I'm sure there are cases where the issue is that nobody has any direct legal interest in a piece of land, but a lot of serious environmental issues have explicitly happened or escalated because the owner did not care or could not afford to remedy the problems. The bigger fiction is to think that the owner will always "care very deeply" about the environmental quality of their land.
RobertoG 9y ago
>>'It is really the very existence of the legal-fiction of "public land"' I don't understand. How is the legal fiction of 'public land' more fictitious that the concept of 'private land'?
Angostura 9y ago
How do you aim to divide up ownership of atmosphere and ocean. More importantly, how do you cope with the person who buys the entire amazon basin and decides that, actually logging it is going to be the best way to realise its immediate value.
zuminator 9y ago
Just because I own a piece of land, why would I care about its environmental quality? Let's say I own a million dollar parcel and through various means I'm able to extract 10 million of value from that parcel but I leave it utterly ruined and unfit for human life. Why do I care? I made my profit, I walk away. Or maybe the tract is owned by my shell corporation. I extract millions, polluting the property and that of surrounding neighbors as well. A large swath of land lays in ruin. My neighbors sue the owner of my tract, ie the corporation, which promptly goes bankrupt. I don't care, I've already made my fortune and I'm protected by the corporate veil. If you say in such a case I shouldn't be protected, then you're arguing in favor of special penalties with respect to environmental issues.
crimsonalucard 9y ago
Commons isn't just land. It is anything that is shared publicly. Roads and the oxygen you breath are two examples. Both of those examples mentioned above are right now being heavily polluted. The tragedy of the commons is essentially this: The cost of me polluting the air by driving a car is much less then the cost of me not polluting the air and walking 20 miles to work instead. My pollution contribution to the air is minor when compared to walking 20 miles and therefore by choosing to drive i am acting logically. The phenomenon ghe theory addresses is that when everybody does this the aggregate contribution to pollution ends up destroying the commons. Therein lies the tragedy: groups of people acting logically in picking the lesser evil end up destroying the commons. Why do people even argue about this theory? It's readily apparent if you drive a car or use any form of non renewable energy.

by _red 9y ago

titzer 9y ago

Well, American Indians and probably most of the indigenous peoples of the Earth would thoroughly and fundamentally disagree that the invented concept is "public land", but rather "private land". In a world where corporations buy land, pillage all of its natural resources, then sell off a smoking crater, the loser is always the environment, as corporations and people downcycle real estate constantly, extracting their profits, destroying what was there before, dodging externalities, and then often defrauding the next investor. Look what was there before and what is left over after the whole cycle. It's shit. You should take a look at the forests of New Zealand and the movement to make logging on public lands illegal.

golergka 9y ago
If you're talking about the pre-colonization state of these cultures, they would disagree with a lot of concepts we use now. For example, zero and negative numbers. Does it mean that zero and negative numbers are morally bankrupt?
- titzer 9y ago
  The universe is amoral and mathematics doubly so, but the OP was talking about how the "invented concept" of public land gives rise to this tragedy of the commons. I am directly disagreeing in that A.) public land is the invented concept (it isn't, private land is) B.) public land is where the tragedy of the commons occurs (it isn't always, as tragedy happens on private lands, perhaps moreso). I can give more examples of B.) where corporations visit environmental destruction on lands they own (e.g. gold mines) and then sell off the leftover, ruined real estate, having still profited handsomely in the end.

lmm 9y ago

> Imbued in your statement is an even more difficult knot to undo. "Tragedy of the Commons" is caused by the very existence of the modern state. > Common land = public land. In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land. The state is the entity that owns all land - prior to states land was simply not owned - and state organs like the EPA are the advocates who care deeply about the environmental quality of public land. You can't address environmental issues on a smaller scale - indeed even individual states are too small a scale be able to address inherently global problems like CO2 emissions. Any "private" owner of the entire planet, or even of a large enough region to address issues like fishery management or water table pollution, would have to function like a state and share the same problems (e.g. lack of competing alternatives).

_red 9y ago
>The state is the entity that owns all land Who owns the state?
- orf 9y ago
  The people, 'the commons'
  - isostatic 9y ago
    Everyone has 1 non-transferable share

netrus 9y ago

Hm, that doesn't sound very convincing to me. When I fly over Germany, it appears to me that actually almost every land is owned by people that are affected by the environment a lot: Farmers. Furthermore, air polution is one of the biggest environmental concerns right now, and air does not care about land ownership - city people are affected by bad air, but how would their situtation be better without the modern state and common land? If i'd own the river flowing by a big plant, would I care more about it's preservation than the polution-fee I could take from the company owner? One last point: you call public land a legal-fiction - that's interesting, because I would call property rights a legal fiction, and "public ownership" the natural state of stuff (one could argue every legal concept is fiction, I'd tend to agree with that).

_red 9y ago
>because I would call property rights a legal fiction Nearly every culture that has ever existed has recognized that someone taking something from you by force is crime. Its a normative expectation for nearly 100% of all humans. People like yourself, who don't see a value in others property (ie. think you are free to take it), are generally seen as very dangerous and inconsiderate people.
- zaarn 9y ago
  Property Rights aren't an inherent part of nature just because humans like to be greedy. Property Rights exist, at best, as part of a human narrative that we have some interest in designating a legal owner for a piece of dirt. Without humans, the dirt is not owned. With humans, we say we own the dirt (but there is no actual, objective ownership). >People like yourself, who don't see a value in others property I don't think GP made that point, rather that until Humans come along, no ownership, ie, public ownership, is the default. The land is owned by nobody until someone buys it. This can be shown with an example; Mars. Who, at this current moment, owns mars? All the dirt on mars must, by your argument, be owned by someone.
  - golergka 9y ago
    > Property Rights aren't an inherent part of nature just because humans like to be greedy. Property rights are the first level of abstraction above the physical layer of "might is right". "Public" land is usually a higher level of abstraction, because it almost always still limits who is the public: even indigenous people usually mean "public" land as land of our tribe, not their tribe.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

In this truly private system, who owns the river that runs through the parcel of land? Who owns the fish that swim upstream from the ocean to spawn every year? Who owns the air? What organisation decides who wins when the factory in one parcel of land upstream pumps poison into the water and the air. Who judges exactly how much monetary damages are due from destroying an ecosystem? None of this libertarian fantasy is remotely feasible, even after you assume that you can assign property rights to every molecule of the earth and have to sign contracts to take a breath.

golergka 9y ago
No fantasy that takes an ideology and tries to implement it without any nuance and compromise with reality is feasible, period. Libertarianism and anti-statism are usually quite more nuanced than their typical strawmen, and many libertarians are OK with small state which would be in charge of law enforcement. However, such small state still has no reason to own any land (except for government buildings) or designate any land as "public".
- tpush 9y ago
  > However, such small state still has no reason to own any land (except for government buildings) or designate any land as "public" You didn't address ZeroGravitas' first paragraph; how would you solve these issues?
- vidarh 9y ago
  The original libertarian explicitly argued for public ownership of almost everything: Joseph Dejacques, in the first use of the word libertarian, used it to chastise Proudhon as being "just" a "moderate anarchist" and "liberal" rather than libertarian over his views on women, but then went on to rail against the limitations on humanity, including property, setting his views strongly apart from Proudhon by going much further, and in particularly by denouncing property much stronger than even Proudhon's "property is theft" [1]: > Be then frankly an entire anarchist and not a quarter anarchist, an eighth anarchist, or one-sixteenth anarchist, as one is a one-fourth, one-eighth or one-sixteenth partner in trade. Go beyond the abolition of contract to the abolition not only of the sword and of capital, but also of property and of authority in all its forms. Then you will have arrived at the anarchist community; that is to say, the social state where each one is free to produce or consume according to his will or his fancy without controlling, or being controlled by any other person whatever; where the balance of production and consumption is established naturally, no longer by the restrictive laws and arbitrary force of others, but by the free exercise of industry prompted by the needs and desires of each individual. The sea of humanity needs no dikes. Give its tides full sweep and each day they will find their level. The argument against public ownership came first about a century after libertarianism was first conceived, with the rise of right-wing libertarianism, which took left wing libertarianism and turned it pretty much upside down by adding a focus on property right enforcement which is in direct opposition to the original principles of libertarianism. A key point of Dejacques original libertarianism was the view that enforcement of property rights pretty much inherently deprives the public of liberty by using the state to add restraints on people that take away far more liberty than they grant. Having grown up in Norway - one of a few countries with extensive freedom to roam [2] - I will tell you that nobody can convince me that strict enforcement of property rights is anything but theft from the public; once you are used to it, you feel the loss of that freedom deeply when you go elsewhere and are quite literally fenced in in situations where you'd previously be used to be able to roam free. [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-the-human-being-male-and-female https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

iainmerrick 9y ago

"Tragedy of the Commons" is caused by the very existence of the modern state. No, you have it backwards. The "tragedy" was a fiction invented to justify the Acts of Enclosure in the UK, wherein public land (commons) was fenced off for sole use by the local lords. Here's a good explanation: http://www.monbiot.com/1994/01/01/the-tragedy-of-enclosure/ http://www.monbiot.com/1994/01/01/the-tragedy-of-enclosure/ In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land. OK, here are two counterpoints: First, if land is held in common, everybody has a share of ownership, including people who actually live there and therefore really do care deeply about the environmental quality. Second, just look at the recent stories about Toys'R'Us. It was purchased in a leveraged buyout in 2005 -- meaning the buyers paid relatively little and the company was saddled with a massive debt. By your argument, wouldn't those new owners care deeply about the long-term health of the company? Instead they extracted as much cash as possible and left behind a bankrupt shell. I think the analogy to private land is pretty clear.

crimsonalucard 9y ago
Your article says Hardins theory only works if their is no such thing as ownership. A commons is a piece of land supposedly used commonly and not owned by anyone. So Hardins theory is addressing tthings like the ocean and the air. This article might as well be rebutting the theory of gravity because it only applies to objects with mass.
- iainmerrick 9y ago
  So Hardins theory is addressing tthings like the ocean and the air. No, Hardin himself intended his theory to address land usage; it's this article that argues the theory doesn't actually work properly in that context.
  - crimsonalucard 9y ago
    iainmerrick. You are completely and utterly incorrect. Read hardins original article. Hardin is addressing Everything that is "common." I can prove it to you. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full This is the original article by Hardin. Ctrl-F oceans. Then Ctrl-F pollution. You will see that Hardin directly references pollution and oceans as commons. If you read the entire article you will see that he talks about population control more than he talks about land.

vidarh 9y ago

> every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land. Commodore Business Machines for several decades had their plant in Westchester, PA, leak assorted chemical related to their chip manufacturing. When this was identified, they started some improvement work, but didn't fix the problem. The site was eventually sold to a company that bought it knowing it was contaminated, who continued to operate a chip manufacturing business there, until the demanded improvements made it impossible for them to operate. Despite corporate ownership for years, nobody advocated or cared very deeply about the environmental quality of this land until they were forced to by the EPA, because it did not affect their business. Other people nearby would largely have remained unaffected for many years too, until chemicals started seeping out, at which point Commodore was in decline and eventually went bankrupt. Here's one of the documents regarding this site: https://semspub.epa.gov/work/03/50245.pdf https://semspub.epa.gov/work/03/50245.pdf I'm sure there are cases where the issue is that nobody has any direct legal interest in a piece of land, but a lot of serious environmental issues have explicitly happened or escalated because the owner did not care or could not afford to remedy the problems. The bigger fiction is to think that the owner will always "care very deeply" about the environmental quality of their land.

RobertoG 9y ago

>>'It is really the very existence of the legal-fiction of "public land"' I don't understand. How is the legal fiction of 'public land' more fictitious that the concept of 'private land'?

Angostura 9y ago

How do you aim to divide up ownership of atmosphere and ocean. More importantly, how do you cope with the person who buys the entire amazon basin and decides that, actually logging it is going to be the best way to realise its immediate value.

zuminator 9y ago

Just because I own a piece of land, why would I care about its environmental quality? Let's say I own a million dollar parcel and through various means I'm able to extract 10 million of value from that parcel but I leave it utterly ruined and unfit for human life. Why do I care? I made my profit, I walk away. Or maybe the tract is owned by my shell corporation. I extract millions, polluting the property and that of surrounding neighbors as well. A large swath of land lays in ruin. My neighbors sue the owner of my tract, ie the corporation, which promptly goes bankrupt. I don't care, I've already made my fortune and I'm protected by the corporate veil. If you say in such a case I shouldn't be protected, then you're arguing in favor of special penalties with respect to environmental issues.

crimsonalucard 9y ago

Commons isn't just land. It is anything that is shared publicly. Roads and the oxygen you breath are two examples. Both of those examples mentioned above are right now being heavily polluted. The tragedy of the commons is essentially this: The cost of me polluting the air by driving a car is much less then the cost of me not polluting the air and walking 20 miles to work instead. My pollution contribution to the air is minor when compared to walking 20 miles and therefore by choosing to drive i am acting logically. The phenomenon ghe theory addresses is that when everybody does this the aggregate contribution to pollution ends up destroying the commons. Therein lies the tragedy: groups of people acting logically in picking the lesser evil end up destroying the commons. Why do people even argue about this theory? It's readily apparent if you drive a car or use any form of non renewable energy.