Tragedy of the commons

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ℹ️Tragedy of the commons
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By :  Aristotle Sabouni
Created :  2017-04-16
    1Liner  : 
Malthusian Catastrophes and Tragedy of the commons is used to justify leftist actions, despite always being wrong.
Summary  : 
We often get dire warnings about Malthusian Catastrophes, Ehrlich's population bombs and how individuals can't be trusted to manage shared interests. We need government to protect us from ourselves. History shows the opposite: individuals form small governments for common interests better than big governments, unless big government stops them.

It seems we always get these dire warnings, about how we need government to protect us, and one of the many fallacies is used to justify it. Here’s a little history of those fallacies.

Tragedy of the Commons[edit | edit source]

In 1833 William Forster Lloyd (economist) regurgitated Malthus's idea in an essay called "the tragedy of the commons” (TOC), writing on the effects of unregulated grazing on common land in England (4). Only it wasn’t taken seriously at the time, because this hadn’t ever been a problem for 700 years. He was ignored, and society continued to evolve and get better.

The Prisoners Dilemma[edit | edit source]

In 1950 Flood and Dresher borrowed the idea of "failure to cooperate” and created something for Game Theory called the Prisoners Dilemma (5). It was the cop interrogation technique where the guy that talks first gets a reduced sentence (but if they both talk, neither gets the deal). If they both shut-up, they win, but since they don’t know what the other guy will do, they often talk first (to save themselves).

But that’s the key to why tragedy of the commons never happens in the real world. If they can communicate, they can make a deal in their mutual interest. But if they’re isolated, they can not, and will do the wrong thing. Which is why England (and most places) never had problems with “commons”. In fact, quite the opposite. They managed those commons better than Government (and in many more ways): they just negotiate/share and things usually worked out for the best. The times that you get TOC problems is when government steps in, and gets between the parties (often using anti-Collusion or Anti-Trust laws to prevent cooperation and communication), then things went to shit.

This irony is important. It means that the collectivists that use the TOC (or any variants), don’t realize that it’s not only false, but that it’s some of the greatest evidence against their very ideals. Luckily for them, most of their followers aren’t fully aware of the history and facts, so the argument works in spite of all the evidence against it.

People[edit | edit source]

Conclusion[edit | edit source]

🗒️ NOTE
Failed ideas should die out when they’re disproven. But old collectivists don’t learn, and new ones are created in Universities/factories at an alarming rate. They just keep spoon-feeding slightly tweaked variants of the same bullshit, and the gullible gobble it down, “Sure, all the other variants have failed before, but this time it’s different...”.

Malthusian Catastrophes and Tragedy of the commons (the idea that people can't cooperate for mutual interest), is defied by every cross industry standard, Open Source software, and everything ever released to public domain. Yet the idea that we need government to protect us from ourselves, is still used to justify Marxism, despite it being fundamentally wrong.

If you want to see whether government can protect us from tragedy of the commons, just look to countries that had the strongest authoritarian governments like USSR, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Cambodia, Venezuela, Cuba, and tell us how well they’ve managed their resources compared to countries like ours? We created most of the innovations we consider “greener” and better for the environment, most coming not from Government but our private sectors, and Government jumping on board later. While they had Goverment policies to prevent the people from doing "bad things", that the government made exceptions for themselves, and the people mostly ignored.

Those of us who have some idea of history, science, sociology, human nature, realize that individuals can cooperate for mutual interest just fine, and it’s been government interfering with those natural processes that has created far more problems than it has ever helped.

Related[edit | edit source]

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Malthusian Catastrophe
Peak Oil Theory

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