The following is an excerpt from The Innovator Versus the Collective
For decades, the government has sought to reduce pollution through regulations. Those regulations have included restrictions on the emissions and discharges from factories and automobiles, as well as the products that consumers can use. While the results have been mixed at best, the costs imposed on businesses and consumers have been enormous. In addition, billions of dollars have been spent to clean up the commons—lakes, rivers, and similar resources.
Pollution in lakes, rivers, and other waterways, as well as the air, is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. In his article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garret Hardin wrote:
The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated.
While admitting that private property addresses the tragedy of the commons, Hardin and his followers have refused to apply the principles of private property to air and water because they cannot be fenced. Treating air and water as a part of the commons has served to justify anti-pollution legislation (as well as other environmental legislation) for more than four decades.
Certainly, it is true that air and water cannot be readily fenced. At least, it can’t be done in a literal sense. It can be done figuratively—we can apply the principles of property rights to air and water. If we want to eliminate the tragedy of the commons, then we must reject the notion of the commons and apply property rights to all resources when appropriate, including air and water.
In the next post, we will examine how property rights can be applied to water.