As BP's oil spills into one of those inconvenient "ecosystems", now even Reason TV rants about "dying oceans"
I continue to scratch my head on the knee-jerk reactions by Austrian-libertarians on problems regarding management of common resources: are not our physical and electronic communities commons? Don’t commons support many people directly, and us all indirectly? Aren’t there huge and obvious commons-related problems that stem from government ownership and “management” of resources – be they federal lands, the seas, our fiat currency, or our financial institutions and publicly-listed companies?
Don’t we all know that government gets in the way, frustrating the ability of people with differing preferences to search for and reach mutual accommodations, and instead putting them at loggerheads in zero-sum situations?
The unbecoming reflexive hostility indicates that even those who think they have their thinking caps on cannot see past the partisan conflict that government itself generates.
But I dither. Allow me to gather here for interested readers some scraps of information regarding the state of our oceans.
1. From my initial response to Lew Rockwell‘s “Feel Sorry for BP? ” post:
Lew: “the environmentalists went nuts yet again, using the occasion to flail a private corporation and wail about the plight of the “ecosystem,” which somehow managed to survive and thrive after the Exxon debacle.”
Me: Seems to me your “facts” about the damage done by Exxon Valdez to the “environment” – including the small segments used by by man – and recovery/compensation are basically counterfactual:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
http://www.alternet.org/environment/22260
Further, it seems you don’t have any real clue as to the escalating damage that man is doing to our shared ocean “commons”. These two TED talks might help open your eyes:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans.html
4. I note that I have already posted extensively on oceans/fisheries management; for interested readers here are links to some of those posts:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=ocean
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=fisheries
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=whale
5. Finally, one wonders whether, if fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico had clear “catch rights” or similar property rights, and had control over oil gas exploration and development decisions, they would not have done a good deal better in overseeing BP, and whether BP would not have been quite a bit more careful.( Likewise – if BP owned the Gulf, and received revenues from permitting fish harvests!)
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