3.6 Do People Hold a Right to Exist? Part 6

The previous post (3.5) addressed the first two constraints on private property: (1) Foregone opportunities and (2) externalized costs (externalized negatives). This post addresses (3) The “Tragedy of the Commons”. I’ll cover (4) the destruction of the future in the next post. “Private property” is such a familiar term that we ignore its different impacts on the community. Though they overlap, the four constraints reflect different dimensions, that is different ways private property effects the community making private property possible. The idea of hidden different dimensions is similar to how we typically refer to “love” as single thing. When we explain love in context we recognize that it has multiple dimensions: romantic love, parental love, patriotic love, love of home, brotherly love, agape. Each dimension reveals how love impacts people and the community differently.

(3) The “Tragedy of the Commons”¹ is a simple concept with broad implications. The government owns a piece of grazing land that will renewably sustain 100 cows. Extra cows will overgraze the range and destroy it in ten years. Ten ranchers share that common land and each can graze ten cows. One rancher calculates that if he sneaks three extra cows on the range he gets all the profit at one tenth of the cost as the land fails. Five extra cows and he profits enough to retire in five years. Then it wouldn’t matter to him whether he destroys the range. All the ranchers understand the same math. They may not want to cheat, but fear the others will cheat. So they all decide to graze five extra cows. For a while the price of beef drops from overproduction. The community sees this as cheap beef in the grocery store. The ranchers say “graze more cows: cheap meat. The public isn’t harmed.” Then the prices skyrockets: that’s supple and demand. When the range is destroyed, and beef disappears from the market.

Ranchers have long argued that they should be allowed to buy the land. That is a false solution. So long as they can profit from over grazing their land enough to invest in a different business or buy more land, it is financially profitable to destroy the land.

English villagers understood the longterm consequences of destroying the land, and throughly pummeled peasants who abused the commons. Enclosure, selling the common to private individuals, changed that. Rather than preserve the land, as long as an owner could make enough money to buy new land, destroying land was justified. The vast American land, empty of European descents, rewarded this practice. Southern American farmers over produced their cash crop tobacco, destroyed their fields, and demanded the government drive indigenous Americans off their historical land. Especially as the practice of “destroy and move” merged with Capitalism (invented in 1751), private property rights ignored Locke’s admonition that each man ought, as much as possible, to help his neighbor.²

This pattern of maximizing profits by endangering the community plays out in countless variations. The government sets standards for work place safety, pollution, toxic chemicals, food, and medical products and treatment. Corporations,³ more precisely the stockholders in those corporations, complain that government standards are interference. They fund candidates and lobby congress. They go to court to block those community protections.

Without arguing whether a given safety standard is sufficient, collectively they are the grazing limits governing the ranchers’ common. The are an effort to protect the community from the damage (externalized negatives) private property imposes. If factories comply with those environmental and safety standards fewer people die. Corporations argue whether any given rule saves enough lives to justify the costs. Trump’s new presidential order is that the only consideration guiding health, safety, and environmental regulations is the cost of complying with them, not the lives/property saved.⁴ If the standards are enforced, people live, the rain doesn’t destroy the paint on our cars, the snow isn’t poisonous, and the Cuyahoga River doesn’t catch on fire.

The protection of the community commons is not a liberal plot against capitalism. Following WW II, Friedrich Hayek lead the economic conservatives’ fight against communistic socialism. Predictably, the conservatives praising Hayek adopted his views selectively, always favoring of unfettered capitalism. While strongly defending capitalism, Hayek argued that government regulations of businesses was essential to the stability of a country. In the preface to the 1976 edition of The Road to Serfdom he clarified that he opposed a state controlled economy (e.g., the Soviet planned economy), not a welfare state.⁵ He,⁶ wrote that health, safety, and environmental regulations were appropriate and necessary because capitalism was unable to resolve the externalized expenses it created.⁷ His qualification defining legitimate regulations was that all standards be applied uniformly so that they effected every business equally, giving no party special advantages. They were to applied so that no business had a chance to graze extra cattle.

In practice, the tragedy of the commons governs with under-regulated capitalism. With a sufficiently large unemployed population and limited help for the poor, it does not it matter to businesses whether workers die. They are replaceable. The corporation that cheats by violating regulations to save on production costs can sell at a lower price and gain control of the market. In a spiral to the bottom, since all the corporations know the same math, they all have to search for ways to cheat to protect their market share.

The community enforces Hobbes’ social contract, which makes private property possible. The community is our commons and protecting its health vital to our wellbeing. Whether as private property or capitalism, without government regulation the tragedy of the commons drives the community to the lowest level possible. The question becomes, “Do you have enough money to hold a right to exist?” Grants Pass v Johnson said public land is not the commons and your place is in jail.

 1 Hardin, Garrett (1968) “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 13 Dec, 162, Issue 3859 pp. 1243-1248.  https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243

2 This change is visible in the 1970s as private equity replaced the post WW II principle that what is good for General Motors is good for America with the duty to maximize shareholder value.

3 I make an important though admittedly crude distinction between privately held companies (entrepreneurs) who may care deeply about their products, workers’ welfare, and environmental impact and publicly held corporations whose duty is to maximize shareholders’ stock value.

 4 In a future post I’ll present the Ford Pinto case addressing liability and the value of life.

5 Caldwell, Bruce The Road to Serfdom text and documents Vol. II University of Chicago Press 2007

5 Hayek, Friedrich The Road to Serfdom, Routledge Press, UK, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1994) pps 43, 44, 45

7 ibid p 43 “To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances, or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with the preservation of competition.”