Capitalism and the Tragedy of the Commons

Bfgrn

Bfgrn

New member
The commons were traditionally defined as the elements of the environment - forests, atmosphere, rivers, fisheries or grazing land - that we all share. These are the tangible and intangible aspects of the environment that no-one owns but everybody enjoys.
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Capitalism's most dangerous flaw is that it has no inherent method for dealing with the tragedy of the commons.

Most of capitalism's cheerleaders simply never mention the tragedy of the commons, or deny that such a thing exists. The all wise invisible hand of the marketplace, some claim, is as competent to keep us out of future trouble as it is to grant us future benefit.

But you must truly have blinders on to believe this, as the visible effects of human behavior prove it is not so.

Free market capitalism teaches us how to better our lives, and those of other people, by reaching out and taking, and by doing so more efficiently and productively. Capitalism is very bad at teaching us when to refrain from taking. That part of ourselves which steps forward to suggest that "thou shalt not"--named the "superego" by Freud--simply does not form part of the free market system. Just as the ego and the id in the Freudian paradigm must refer to something outside themselves for the restraint that so often means survival, humans must look outside the capitalist system for the self-restraint that will avoid the destruction of every commons used by us. Our history also illustrates that the destruction of the commons will not be stopped by shame, moral admonitions, or cultural mores anywhere near so effectively as it will be by the will of the people expressed as a protective mandate; in other words, by government.

Hayek, the philosopher of free markets, admits this when he says, in discussing the importance of government to a free market system:

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.

In fact, Hayek is dealing directly with the tragedy of the commons when he says a page later that free market pricing fails when "the damage caused to others by certain uses of property cannot be effectively charged to the owner of that property." He continues:

Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the danger for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism.

Hayek was not a libertarian; he believed in striking the right balance between government and markets. Capitalism may contribute a large part of human welfare and progress, but it cannot do so without some external constraints.

Capitalism and the Tragedy of the Commons


All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.
Edmund Burke
 
Bfgrn said:
I often wondered, if God created trees, shouldn't it be liberals calling CONSERVE-ative Christians tree huggers?
Click to expand...

Many of the staunches wildlife preservers are evil conservative hunters.

But they're probably not anti-human AGW alarmists like you.
 
Bfgrn said:
Why do you keep saying such stupid things? I have a theory...
Click to expand...

Actually, he is right when he says "Many of the staunches wildlife preservers are evil conservative hunters". And we fund major portions of the conservation work.
 
WinterBorn said:
Actually, he is right when he says "Many of the staunches wildlife preservers are evil conservative hunters". And we fund major portions of the conservation work.
Click to expand...

There is nothing evil about hunting. What IS evil is destroying the hunting grounds where Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett roamed. Communities are being eviscerated and permanently impoverished as big coal cuts down the Appalachian mountains. These historic landscapes are the source of our values and our culture. That is what conservatism used to mean. But the GOP has taken conserve out of conservative.

------------------------

When we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our children. We’re not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We’re preserving those forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity standing than they would have if we cut them down. I’m not fighting for the Hudson River for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the striped bass, but because I believe my life will be richer, and my children and my community will be richer, if we live in a world where there are shad and sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson. And where my children can see the traditional gear, commercial fishermen on the Hudson, that I have spent 22 years fighting for their livelihoods, their rights, their culture, and their values. I want my kids to be able to see them out in their tiny boats using the same fishing methods that they learned, that their great-grandparents learned, from the Algonquin Indians, who taught them to the original settlers of New Amsterdam. I want them to be able to see them with their ash poles and gill nets and be able to touch them when they come to shore to wait out the tides, to repair their nets. And in doing that, connect themselves to 350 years of New York State history. And understand that they’re part of something larger than themselves. They’re part of a continuum. They’re part of a community.

I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where there are no commercial fishermen on the Hudson, where it’s all Gorton’s Seafood and Unilever and 400-ton factory trawlers 100 miles offshore strip-mining the ocean with no interface with humanity. And where there are no family farmers left in America. Where it’s all Smithfield and Cargill and Premium Standard farms raising animals in factories and treating their stock and their neighbors and their workers with unspeakable cruelty. And where we’ve lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things that connect us to the 10,000 generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops. And that connect us ultimately to God.

I don’t believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as God, but I do believe that it’s the way that God communicates to us most forcefully. God talks to human beings through many vectors. Through each other, through organized religions, through wise people, and through the great books of those religions. Through art and literature and music and poetry. But nowhere with such force and clarity and detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation.

We don’t know Michelangelo by reading his biography. We know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation. And particularly wilderness, which is the undiluted work of the Creator. And you know if you look at every one of the great religious traditions throughout the history of mankind, the central epiphany always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go to the wilderness to experience self realization and nirvana Mohammad had to go to the wilderness. Moses had to go to the wilderness of Mt. Sinai for 40 days alone to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years wandering the wilderness to purge themselves of 400 years of slavery in Egypt. Christ had to go into the wilderness for 40 days to discover his divinity for the first time.

His mentor was John the Baptist, a man who lived in the Jordan valley dressed in the skins of wild beasts and ate locust and the honey of wild bees, and all of Christ’s parables are taken from nature. I am the vine; you are the branches. The mustard seed, the little swallows, the scattering of seeds on the fallow ground, the lilies of the field. He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. The reason he did that was that’s how he stayed in touch with the people. It’s the same reason all the Talmudic prophets, the Koranic prophets, the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament prophets. Even the pagan prophets like Aesop, they did the same thing. They used parables and allegories and fables drawn from nature to teach us the wisdom of God.

And all of the Old Testament prophets, all the Talmudic prophets, all the New Testament prophets came out of the wilderness. Every one of them, and they were all shepherds. That daily connection to nature gave them a special access to the wisdom of the Almighty. They used these parables, and the reason Christ did that was that’s how he stayed in touch with the people. He was saying things that were revolutionary like all the prophets. He was contradicting everything that the common people had heard from the literate sophisticated people of their day, and they would have dismissed him as a quack, but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables through their own observations of the fishes and the birds. And they were able to say, he’s not telling us something new; he’s simply illuminating something very, very old. Messages that were written into creation at the beginning of time by the Creator. We haven’t been able to discern or decipher them until the prophets came along and immersed themselves in wilderness and learned its language and then come back into the cities to tell us about the wisdom of God.

You know, all of our values in this country are the same thing. This is where our values come from, from wilderness and from nature and from the beginning of our national history. People from Sierra Club have to understand this and articulate it. Our greatest spiritual leaders, moral leaders, and philosophers were telling the American people “You don’t have to be ashamed because you don’t have the 1,500 years of culture that they have in Europe, because you have this relationship with the land and particularly the wilderness. That’s going to be the source of your values and virtues and character. If you look at every valid piece of classic American literature the central unifying theme is that nature is the critical defining element of American culture, whether it’s Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway. All of them.

Let me just finish this thought. The first great writer we produced in this country, an international bestseller, was James Fenimore Cooper. He wrote the The Leather Stocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer about this character Natie Bumpo, who was a creature of the American wilderness. He had all the virtues that the European romantics associated with the American woodland; he was a crack shot, he was self reliant, he had fortitude and integrity, and he was a gentleman and honest.

The reason they made him a bestseller in Europe was not because it was great writing; it wasn’t. It was atrocious. But because they believed that there really was a new being being created out of the American forest. We made him a bestseller in our country because we believe that about ourselves.

A generation after that, you had Emerson and Thoreau come along, who have kicked off the traces of the European heritage, and they embrace nature as a spiritual parable of all Americans. They say if you’re an American and you want to hear the voice of God, you have to go into the forest and listen to the songs of the birds and the rustle of the leaves. And if you want to see the American soul you have to look at the mirror of Walden Pond. Our poets Whitman, Frost, Emily Dickenson, Robert Service. Our artists, we have two schools, defining schools of art in this country: the western school — Remington and Russell — and the Hudson River School — Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Samuel F. B. Morse, etc. And all of them painted these stark, indomitable portraits. Storm King Mountain, El Capitan, the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. Any evidence of humanity is in ruins.

And there are other national schools of art that painted nature. The British have their still lifes, and the French and Italians and their garden scenes, etc. But that’s nature tamed. The American artists chose to paint nature in its wildest state because they saw that as the way to capture the American soul.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.


"I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came."
President John F. Kennedy
Newport, Rhode Island
September 14, 1962
 
Last edited:
Bfgrn said:
There is nothing evil about hunting. What IS evil is destroying the hunting grounds where Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett roamed. Communities are being eviscerated and permanently impoverished as big coal cuts down the Appalachian mountains. These historic landscapes are the source of our values and our culture. That is what conservatism used to mean. But the GOP has taken conserve out of conservative.

------------------------

When we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our children. We’re not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We’re preserving those forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity standing than they would have if we cut them down. I’m not fighting for the Hudson River for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the striped bass, but because I believe my life will be richer, and my children and my community will be richer, if we live in a world where there are shad and sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson. And where my children can see the traditional gear, commercial fishermen on the Hudson, that I have spent 22 years fighting for their livelihoods, their rights, their culture, and their values. I want my kids to be able to see them out in their tiny boats using the same fishing methods that they learned, that their great-grandparents learned, from the Algonquin Indians, who taught them to the original settlers of New Amsterdam. I want them to be able to see them with their ash poles and gill nets and be able to touch them when they come to shore to wait out the tides, to repair their nets. And in doing that, connect themselves to 350 years of New York State history. And understand that they’re part of something larger than themselves. They’re part of a continuum. They’re part of a community.

I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where there are no commercial fishermen on the Hudson, where it’s all Gorton’s Seafood and Unilever and 400-ton factory trawlers 100 miles offshore strip-mining the ocean with no interface with humanity. And where there are no family farmers left in America. Where it’s all Smithfield and Cargill and Premium Standard farms raising animals in factories and treating their stock and their neighbors and their workers with unspeakable cruelty. And where we’ve lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things that connect us to the 10,000 generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops. And that connect us ultimately to God.

I don’t believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as God, but I do believe that it’s the way that God communicates to us most forcefully. God talks to human beings through many vectors. Through each other, through organized religions, through wise people, and through the great books of those religions. Through art and literature and music and poetry. But nowhere with such force and clarity and detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation.

We don’t know Michelangelo by reading his biography. We know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation. And particularly wilderness, which is the undiluted work of the Creator. [applause] And you know if you look at every one of the great religious traditions throughout the history of mankind, the central epiphany always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go to the wilderness to experience self realization and nirvana Mohammad had to go to the wilderness. Moses had to go to the wilderness of Mt. Sinai for 40 days alone to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years wandering the wilderness to purge themselves of 400 years of slavery in Egypt. Christ had to go into the wilderness for 40 days to discover his divinity for the first time.

His mentor was John the Baptist, a man who lived in the Jordan valley dressed in the skins of wild beasts and ate locust and the honey of wild bees, and all of Christ’s parables are taken from nature. I am the vine; you are the branches. The mustard seed, the little swallows, the scattering of seeds on the fallow ground, the lilies of the field. He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. The reason he did that was that’s how he stayed in touch with the people. It’s the same reason all the Talmudic prophets, the Koranic prophets, the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament prophets. Even the pagan prophets like Aesop, they did the same thing. They used parables and allegories and fables drawn from nature to teach us the wisdom of God.

And all of the Old Testament prophets, all the Talmudic prophets, all the New Testament prophets came out of the wilderness. Every one of them, and they were all shepherds. That daily connection to nature gave them a special access to the wisdom of the Almighty. They used these parables, and the reason Christ did that was that’s how he stayed in touch with the people. He was saying things that were revolutionary like all the prophets. He was contradicting everything that the common people had heard from the literate sophisticated people of their day, and they would have dismissed him as a quack, but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables through their own observations of the fishes and the birds. And they were able to say, he’s not telling us something new; he’s simply illuminating something very, very old. Messages that were written into creation at the beginning of time by the Creator. We haven’t been able to discern or decipher them until the prophets came along and immersed themselves in wilderness and learned its language and then come back into the cities to tell us about the wisdom of God.

You know, all of our values in this country are the same thing. This is where our values come from, from wilderness and from nature and from the beginning of our national history. People from Sierra Club have to understand this and articulate it. Our greatest spiritual leaders, moral leaders, and philosophers were telling the American people “You don’t have to be ashamed because you don’t have the 1,500 years of culture that they have in Europe, because you have this relationship with the land and particularly the wilderness. That’s going to be the source of your values and virtues and character. If you look at every valid piece of classic American literature the central unifying theme is that nature is the critical defining element of American culture, whether it’s Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway. All of them.

Let me just finish this thought. The first great writer we produced in this country, an international bestseller, was James Fenimore Cooper. He wrote the The Leather Stocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer about this character Natie Bumpo, who was a creature of the American wilderness. He had all the virtues that the European romantics associated with the American woodland; he was a crack shot, he was self reliant, he had fortitude and integrity, and he was a gentleman and honest.

The reason they made him a bestseller in Europe was not because it was great writing; it wasn’t. It was atrocious. But because they believed that there really was a new being being created out of the American forest. We made him a bestseller in our country because we believe that about ourselves.

A generation after that, you had Emerson and Thoreau come along, who have kicked off the traces of the European heritage, and they embrace nature as a spiritual parable of all Americans. They say if you’re an American and you want to hear the voice of God, you have to go into the forest and listen to the songs of the birds and the rustle of the leaves. And if you want to see the American soul you have to look at the mirror of Walden Pond. Our poets Whitman, Frost, Emily Dickenson, Robert Service. Our artists, we have two schools, defining schools of art in this country: the western school — Remington and Russell — and the Hudson River School — Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Samuel F. B. Morse, etc. And all of them painted these stark, indomitable portraits. Storm King Mountain, El Capitan, the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. Any evidence of humanity is in ruins.

And there are other national schools of art that painted nature. The British have their still lifes, and the French and Italians and their garden scenes, etc. But that’s nature tamed. The American artists chose to paint nature in its wildest state because they saw that as the way to capture the American soul.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Click to expand...


And plant life depends on Co2.

Claiming it's a pollutant means you hate trees.
 
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