How does the mind deceive us! Let me count some of its infinite ways.
It was a painter, Goya, who pinpointed the problem. He saw that "Dreams of reason produce monsters."
And it was my father who gave me the key to unlock some of the related mysteries. He offered this rule: "Every excess is a defect."
Private property is a very good thing. It was Saint Thomas Aquinas who made an exhaustive and convincing list of the benefits of private property. Very little has been added to that list — except an error.
The error consists in believing that the benefits of private property extend without limits, even to cover the privatization of common property.
Privatization of the commons is not a newly discovered truth. Privatization of the commons is an ideology whose results have been proven disastrous time and time again.
Privatization of the commons is based on confusion between the goose and the golden egg.
The golden egg is the right of access to the commons.
The commons are common property that belongs to the nation as a whole, the people as a whole. Ever since time immemorial, the traditional legal right through which common property is privatized has been the exercise of labor. One has free access to common resources; one works on the pool of common resources. And through the ownership of one's labor, one acquires legal ownership of the product of one's labor.
Privatizing the commons in any other way kills the goose.
Privatization of the commons under the guise of offering sound management of the resources is an arbitrary act. When it does not produce the expected results it proves to be a misguided act.
Privatization of a pool of common natural resources such as the fisheries, through sale of licenses, or, lately, "catch shares" is an act of thievery by the government, because common property does not belong to the state. Common property belongs to the nation as a whole.
This act of thievery ends up killing the commons. Privatization of the commons, traditionally called the enclosure of the commons, ends in tragedy. The commons collapse when they are enclosed.
The reasons why the enclosures collapse are all tightly integrated. There is indeed economic justice in the world. The thief of common resources does not know how to operate the resources; therefore, he wants to be paid to grant to others the use of what he has exploited; and the buyer now needs to recover the price of extortion, hence he has to overcapitalize his operation. It is over-capitalization that leads to over-exploitation of natural resources. Over-exploited natural resources defend themselves by collapsing.
Three sheep lived on the natural resources of the commons for millions of years; 1,000 sheep lasted but a few years. Even Garret Hardin, the father of the myth of the "tragedy of the commons," recognized this simple historical fact toward the end of his life. He recanted his misbegotten theories about the tragedy of the commons. He realized he should have analyzed instead the "tragedy of the enclosures."
And he should also have pointed out that a parallel tragedy often unfolds in the financial markets. When Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) or "shares" are sold, their value is soon inflated; a financial bubble is created and it unavoidably bursts.
Environmentalists do not seem to have listened to Hardin's recovery of common sense and historical truth, yet.
Pew environmentalists are goading administrators at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) into believing that the family fishing boat has been causing the depletion of traditional fishing stocks. Hence they believe that the fisheries, which have forever been administered as common property, must be enclosed.
The larger the bodies of fishing waters that are enclosed, the harder the collapse of the species living in them. This is a phenomenon that is occurring before our very eyes.
No matter the historical reality, the harder the fisheries collapse because of misguided regulation, the noisier the call for further restrictions.
Why? Because, to cover up the error of one's way, the easier route is to call for more, not less, of the same.
At this point, the rationalizations multiply; the misperception of reality becomes compounded.
The first misperception concerns science. There is no recognition that the attribution of stocks depletion to over-fishing done by the fishermen is an assumption; that the assumption is based on outdated — imagined — linear and static science, and that modern dynamic and organic science proves, on the basis of biological and statistical evidence, that over-fishing is done by the natural predators of fish.
The second misperception is this: Whenever and wherever there has been human over-fishing, the over-fishing has been done under the aegis of large corporations — not by family fishing boats.
The third misperception is this: Penalizing the family fishing boat through unconscionable restrictions on its operations does not favor the privatization of the natural resources; it only leads to concentration of fishing operations into a few hands. It favors monopolies rather than free enterprise; hence, one reaches the precise opposite of the proclaimed aim of privatization of the commons.
One would expect these beliefs to be held by declared enemies of the fisheries. One would then know how to deal with them. The only reason they are still in circulation is that they are held by public servants who are sworn to serve the common good.
Carmine Gorga, who is president of Polis-tics Inc., based in Gloucester. His latest book is titled "To My Polis, With Love: May Gloucester Show the World the Ways of Frugality."
