I tripped into free market ideology more than I came upon it. After years of examining political philosophies of all flavors, I settled on classical liberalism simply because it seemed to me it was the most honest. Test it, twist it, warp it-- it always held up. As other forms of societal organization crumbled before practical realities (authoritarianism failed under vanity, communism failed via a lack of individual incentive, fascism collapsed because of cruelty, anarchy stumbled without order) the free market was the only thing, as I saw it, left standing.
But as capably as today's libertarians can knock down arguments, the one idea I just haven't fully adopted yet is the concept that private ownership negates all communal need. I've written here before that I think an important characteristic of a true free market is a functional, honest system of justice. You can't have private property if someone's stealing it all the time. We need police, judges, and prisons. But there's another area of collective effort where I'm not sure I align with the libertarians, and that's the tragedy of the commons.
I am not convinced that private ownership alone can take care of this dilemma.
In short, the tragedy of the commons says that where there is a communal resource, it will be exploited by everyone to the point that it is destroyed and everyone loses. The natural conclusion from opponents of libertarianism then is that we need a central authority, the state, to govern the use of these common resources.
The concept derives from an article written by ecologist Garrett Hardin in the 1960s outlining the problem of overgrazing of "commons," or free space, around European villages. Farmers would send their cows to graze in these public areas and, having no interest in the land other than wanting to fatten up their cows, would encourage their animals to gorge themselves-- as cow are prone to do when left to eat. Eventually, these farmers destroyed the commons.
The classic libertarian counterargument, put in place in England by the Inclosure Act, which privatized public land, was to simply convert the commons into private holdings. That way there was a private interest in protecting the land.
The traditional statist approach is to regulate the commons. The idea is to create some sort of government bureaucracy to police the commons to prevent overexploitation.
I certainly prefer the first approach. While it has it's shortcomings (if the commons are in private hands, aren't they effectively lost to society, except for the owner? what guarantees are there that the private land owner will manage the land sensibly?) the statist approach is far more problematic. For one, the private solution is self-funding. The government approach requires a new agency to regulate the commons. Additionally, I am not sanguine about the capacity of bureaucrats to make proper decisions about how to administer the commons. Another concern is that, paradoxically, government regulation benefits corporations. When agencies come about to regulate, they are infiltrated by lobbyists and ultimately used to pass easy to skirt rules and squash competition.
Where I run into a dilemma though, is where the commons are complex, and the interaction of parties in the commons have profound consequences beyond the immediate. A superb article in the Washington Monthly this week outlines this challenge in the management of bait fish populations off America's east coast.
If we assign fishing rights to a certain population of fish to a certain company, that company will certainly protect those fish to a degree to maintain their population of resources-- but will they give a damn if that population affects other fish, which they don't rely on for income, absent regulation? The article outlines how Omega Protein (this company needs to hire a new PR firm, because their current name sounds like the sort of company that would be the bad guy in a children's book) catches menhaden, a small ocean fish, by the bazillions and turns them into everything from dog food to iPhone cases. Writer Alison Fairbrother implies better regulation would prevent the company from overfishing the menhaden, which would in turn prevent striped bass populations, which feed on the smaller fish, from collapsing.
A libertarian would argue that regulating the menhaden would be an unfair interference into private property rights and the better course would simply to be to convert the ocean into private property. Under this theory, Omega Protein (in my hypothetical they are renamed "Progressive Fish Cooperative") would then maintain a stable population of menhaden-- why would they ever want to undermine their own resource?
Leaving aside the fact that historically corporations have very often made the irrational decision to overexploit their own resources, Fairbrother makes the point that Omega Protein's interests are only to maintain a population for reproduction, not necessarily for the benefit of the striped bass.
There is another libertarian argument, one I heard Tom Woods explaining recently which sent a chill up my spine. That argument is essentially "well, we're men. We're in charge. The earth's always changing, if a few species get wiped out-- too bad."
I understand the idea completely that we have an advantage over the lesser species, but do we really want our guiding light in our stewardship of the world to be "we can do it so we should?"
I can't buy this. Every other intellectual dilemma I have run into has been solved by free market thinking but this one is puzzling me. I just can't accept, "tough luck striped bass, you aren't economically viable" as a solution.
I think the solution is that in a few, definable areas the state needs to maintain control for the common good, and the environment is one of those areas. Just as we need police and courts to adjudicate criminal and civil disputes to keep the free market clean, we need a strong authority to prevent overexploitation of resources which cannot be inherently privatized.
And the litmus test for what common resources can and cannot be privatized is simple: simplicity. If something owned by the public can be sold and managed with minimal impact on neighbors (a commons for grazing, for example), I buy the libertarian argument. But when you are addressing a massive, interconnected resource haven like the Atlantic Ocean, government oversight seems sensible.
I'd argue it's even constitutionally warranted. If ever the commerce clause were actionable, it would be in the area of regulating the interaction of states concerning ocean resources.
I hate to say this but I think this applies to the Internet too. I'd like to see an absolute minimum of Internet regulation, to keep domains up, to keep traffic moving slowly, to keep the whole mess of tubes organized. But I'm terrified of privacy exploitation, of over zealous law enforcement, of censorship and of course taxation.
Ultimately, like all political action in a republic, liability rests with the voters. It's fun to blame the politicians, businessmen, lobbyists, academics, and iPhone users for the decline of the menhaden, but sensible policies can only be put in place with political will.
So head over to the Washington Monthly and invest fifteen minutes in reading about why you should be concerned about what striped bass are eating.
Sensible libertarian views on nearly everything- except foreign affairs.