2005/04/24 - José Carlos Rodríguez - Libertad Digital

The Tragedy Of Common Property

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this woeful way of managing the assets. In England, the privatism of the commons, known as the enclosures, allowed a huge increase in the productivity of the land spurring an agrarian revolution that preceded the industrial revolution and making the latter possible.

The Spanish proverb which goes “that which is common belongs to no-one” is accurate. Garrett Hardin didn’t know this Spanish saying but he reached the same conclusion, albeit more elaborately, in his article The Tragedy of the Commons which I quoted in my previous article. I believe that the idea is important enough to merit a closer study.

To a certain extent, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas gave a taste of this reasoning. In more modern times, the economists Alchien and Allen and Ludwig von Mises have discovered it.  However, it was Hardin who was lucky enough to put his name to the tragic process linked to common property. Hardin illustrates his idea with “a pasture open to all”. All farmers will want to get something out of it yet with one peculiarity. Whilst each and every one of takes what they need from the pasture, the costs are not assigned to those who use it but are divided amongst everyone who has access to the communal pasture. In other words, as Hardin himself explained “in sharp contrast to privatism, communism privatises the gain but commonises the losses”. Under these conditions, the desire to exploit the resource to the maximum is not held back by the cost of excessive usage. Besides, as they each know the others are thinking the same way, they will all want to get there first to get the most out of the land before over-exploitation finishes off the resource and no-one can get anything out of it anymore.

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this woeful way of managing the assets. In England, the privatism of the commons, known as the enclosures, allowed a huge increase in the productivity of the land spurring an agrarian revolution that preceded the industrial revolution and making the latter possible. It was thus because private property, unlike common, invites one to care for the resources, even to increase their value over time.

When a slight lack of co-ordination between the German communist leaders led to the pulling down of the Berlin Wall by the masses, a crack appeared in the European Communist world which continued to widen until it was destroyed. The reality of the socialist economy then became known to the West and the effects it had on the environment.  What came afterwards shocked everyone. Not even the catastrophic scenarios ecologists painted of a supposed deterioration of the environment in the free world were enough to describe the damages caused to nature in the socialist countries.

Even in the West, we find numerous resources which have been taken away for private usage, with the consequences foretold by Hardin.  Perhaps the clearest example is that of fishing grounds which have been successively emptied by the boats which have visited them. Attempts have been made to stop this over-exploitation imitating the behaviour of private property by placing bureaucratic limits on the exploitation.  None of that has worked. Only a truly desperate situation has meant that the private property solution has been tolerated which has led to the recovery of the fishing grounds, in some cases quite spectacularly. If you were the owner of a fishing ground, you would not empty it all at once but would try to regenerate it and increase the future production capacity of fish.

The same has happened with other resources. The hunting of great mammals threatened to wipe out certain species. The general solution which was found was not to privatise common property where the prized species were dying, but to forbid their hunting and the trade in the goods taken from these animals. This policy carried out by politicians and ecologists has only led to failure, which of course they have not admitted. In Zimbabwe, the desperate situation of the black rhinoceros forced those in charge to find a desperate solution. They put an end to common property and privatised the exploitation of the rhinoceroses much to the indignation of watermelon ecologists (green on the outside, red on the inside). This indignation was followed by displeasure when the privatisation proved to be a real success.  The same thing happened when the elephant which was literally saved from extinction by private property. The experience with the elephant in Zimbawe has spread to other countries such as Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, Namibia etc.

When we see a species which is in danger of extinction, an overexploited resource, a forest which has become a bleak wasteland, a polluted river and many other excesses, we must remember Hardin and the tragic ending which common property leads to. Private property is nature’s best friend.