Did you hear the Tragedy of the Commons? I thought so. It’s exactly a story the liberal economists would tell you.
“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a tired old saw that gets trotted out
by know-nothing college kids whenever one of us has the gall, the
audacity, to suggest a communal project or program, the idea being that
any resource held for collective use will inevitably be despoiled by
overuse as individuals in the community act on their rational
self-interest and attempt to squeeze as much good out of it as they can.
This idea was first put into words by British economist William Forster
Lloyd in his 1833 pamphlet Two Lectures On The Checks To Population,
wherein he illustrated it with an anecdote about farmers grazing cattle
on common pastures: According to Lloyd, rational self-interest dictates
that the farmers will maximize their usage of what’s effectively free
animal fodder, leading inevitably to spoilage. So, of course, we just
can’t have publicly-owned and available this or that because spoilage by
overuse is inevitable; it’s the Tragedy of the Commons, don’tcha know.
The problem with this is that Lloyd’s illustrative anecdote is just
that: An anecdote. A jack-tale. He made it up. The real, actual,
not-made-up history of land use in England tells rather a different
story.
