Yes - they aren’t “thrown away” anywhere, they get abandoned in-place.
Literally, no, practically, yes.
Container yards were all but paying people to take them away, at one point. If you paid for transport, you could have an end-of-life container that was otherwise taking space they needed.
That’s passed as the pandemic situation has eased, but I can still pick one up here for less than a cart of groceries.
You mean the made-up misnomered metaphor that didn’t bear any relation to how historical Commons worked?
The real tragedy of the Commons was that they were stolen.
I don’t really think this is worth a new thread, but I’m curious about @MrDibble 's attitude towards land. Do you believe it is okay for it to be owned collectively, by a group, but not individually? And does the amount of land matter? For comparison, the land my bed sits on, the land my house sits on (the house i live in >300 days each year), the land i farm, the land i mine.
Depends on the group. In general, land should be held in common by everyone. The amount of land doesn’t matter.
People should have possession of the land they use, as usufruct, but they shouldn’t be able to own any of it to the point of being able to alienate it.
Yes. But under the OP’s theory, AI will make that decision for us, whether we like the outcome or not…sounds a lot like communism under central planning organizations.
People take for granted in today’s society, when they get up in the morning and want a coffee on the way to work, that there’s a Starbuck’s on the way, on the right side of the road, with a drive through with two lanes to effeciently get them their coffee. How did Starbucks know to build that retail outlet in that configuration to meet that person’s needs? Capitalism.
Nitpick not really applicable to the overall sense of the thread, but: dead trees aren’t useless for anything else; they provide nesting spaces for a variety of species, and gradually return nutrients to the forest. It’s not necessary to save all of them for such purposes; but a healthy forest does need some.
I doubt Marx knew any of that. And this is certainly true:
Traditional uses of common land were set up so as to protect the land for that use for future generations. Significant shifts in population numbers or in other factors can break that protection down, and lead to destroying the common resource for everybody. So, of course, does enclosure, which while it may or may not provide the protection (often it does the exact opposite), claims any benefit either long-term or temporary for the few who now own it privately.
That’s not a “need”. Nobody “needed” it a hundred years ago.
It’s a want, a desire. People certainly ought to be able to fulfill desires as well as needs – I’ll even say that people need to be able to fulfill at least some of their desires. A life in which one gets only the bare minimum for survival is a pretty terrible life.
But there’s a great tendency to fail to note that “capitalism” (along, I’'ll admit, with everything else we’ve come up with), while making it possible and even easy for some people to fulfill some desires (which is good) also makes it difficult or even impossible for those people to fulfill other desires and for some people to fulfill desires that may be a whole lot more important for them than being able to get a cup of coffee in a hurry on the way to work is for the people who can now do that.
Not to mention that no other species can now live on that piece of ground.
Yes, it’s possible in some cases to increase the number of choices available. Not everything is a zero-sum game. But no, it is not possible to do anything without their being some cost involved.
You don’t think the tragedy of the commons is real?
Take one of the examples you gave; buying fish fresh off the net at your local fisher’s market. Are you aware fish populations are collapsing? The problem is that nobody owns the fish so nobody has an individual interest in the long term protection of the fish. Everyone’s incentive is to catch and sell as many fish as possible in the short term. Because if they don’t go out today and catch as many fish as possible, somebody else will and either way the fish won’t be there in the future. That’s the problem when a resource is owned communally.
I mean, the flaws in it aren’t exactly subtle. When I read it in high school I started picking it apart, and imagined but never wrote a rebuttal essay entitled, “The Tragedy of the Privates.” A few rebuttals have already been linked in this thread.
I think there’s a phenomenon there, but that it has fuck-all to do with the Commons I’ve actually been discussing, so bringing it up was a complete non sequitur.
Yes.
Are you aware that this is mostly the result of intense commercial fishing for profit at some distance from their own localities, not individuals using the local resources they have traditional access to?
That and climate change and habitat destruction, of course, which I’m sure has no link to commercial exploitation in any way /s.
That’s the incentive that capitalism provides, not the incentive the traditional Commons operated under.
No, that’s the problem when a resource isn’t owned (and managed by a complex of laws and social influence ) at all, by anyone. International waters are not the Commons.
You’re the one who provided the fisherman as an example of how things would work in your economy. I’m just applying that example.
Your fisherman goes out fishing. He’s going to sell the fish he catches. If he catches more fish, he sells more fish and makes more money. The fisherman wants to make more money.
You need to acknowledge that this is capitalism even if you don’t like the word.
The flaws mentioned in the links are that Garrett Hardin was an asshole. I certainly won’t dispute that. But those are flaws in Garrett Hardin not flaws in the idea of the tragedy of the commons.
I provided it as an example of how things actually work, not would work. There are literal fishermen a short drive from me hauling in small lots of fish to a sustainable quota. There is no “catches more fish” after that (not legally, anyway).
They are not free-for-all factory ships evading any real regulation or management on the high seas.
Oh, for the last fucking time:
Selling things is NOT capitalism. Trade is NOT capitalism. Even making a profit is NOT capitalism.
Of course, plenty of flawed people have left behind noble ideas. That Hardin’s tragedy was advanced as part of a white nationalist project should not automatically condemn its merits.
But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else.