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Oggie

@researchfairy But someone wrote something famous called Tragedy of the Commons based on literally nothing but vibes and that implied that the government shouldn't be in charge of stuff! Old random British guy vibes rules clearly state...

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Frank Bennett

@Oggie @researchfairy I always read the Hardin piece as just arguing that regulation *of some sort* is needed to avoid extinguishing resources through competitive consumption. The climate crisis is a good worked example of the basic problem.

The more insidious quasi-libertarian case for slapping property rights on everything in lieu of regulation was pitched by a different author: Demsetz, Toward a Theory of Property Rights, 57 Am. Econ. Rev. 347-359 (1967).

That's the neocon tap root.

johnaldis

Yeah, as someone who sits somewhere between market socialism and a mixed model, I’m a big believer in the tragedy of the commons—that’s precisely why eg the rail network *shouldn’t* be run on the revenue from its own tickets, and why if it operates in a market of any kind that market should very specifically not be “free” (in the sense of “free to extract financial value from the service to give to its owners, to the detriment of its users/customers”).

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