The Tragedy of the Commons

Illinois and North Carolina will be playing Monday night for the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Championship. I was hoping that Michigan State would prevail over North Carolina to make it an all Big Ten Final, but while their loss is sad it is not a tragedy. There was actually good news today as discussed in an article by Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. It turns out that the North American environment is, for lack of a better word, healing. Furthermore, this “healing” is most likely a result of our capitalist economic system.

For decades, environmentalists pointed to various calamities and boasted that they were identifying the problems, which is the first step for providing a solution. But they were wrong; environmental distress is a symptom of political and economic corruption.

America's environmental revival is a rich and complicated story with many specific exceptions, caveats and, of course, setbacks. But the overarching theme is pretty simple: The richer you get, the healthier your environment gets. This is because rich societies can afford to indulge their environmental interests and movements. Poor countries cannot.

Unsurprisingly, rich countries tend to have a better grasp of economics and the role of markets, private stewardship and property rights, reasonable regulations, and so forth. With the exception of some oil-rich states, they're also almost always democratic and hence have systems that can successfully assign blame to, and demand restitution from, polluters. In socialized economies, a "tragedy of the commons" almost always arises.

The Tragedy of the Commons is the phrase used by Garrett Hardin in a 1968 paper by that name. The article essentially argues that unrestricted individual freedom in unregulated areas inevitably causes problems for both the area and the individuals utilizing the area. The most effective social systems for mitigating the excesses of unrestricted freedom are those which utilize mutually accepted coercion within a society that allows personal freedom and individual ownership. In other words, excessive behavior can cause physical damage, and the most effective check on excess comes from social recognition and protection of individual property.