Somehow the world managed to bring many whales back from the brink of extension without throwing up their hands and claiming "tragedy of the commons" or privatizing the ocean.

It's not easy, but recognizing this as a global problem and doing the international consensus building needed to solve this problem should be a priority. The solution will probably need to be a mix of commercial work (properly certified fish farms perhaps), public relations/marketing (i.e. convince people this is important), and funded governmental work (i.e. ban importation of fish not collected in a sustainable fashion).

Governments have shown several successes (of various degrees) in the last 50 years with various endangered species and resources. From whales and ivory, to bald eagles to clean air. Throwing them out of the mix for solutions seems as short sited as not leveraging market dynamics to solve it.

No major whale population has been removed from the endangered list since being placed on it.

And yet fisherman still complain bitterly when they're asked to use sinking lines for their lobster pots to help avoid entanglement. Whales are not a great example to trot out of a healthy ocean.

A few years ago, I spent a few days swimming off a boat around the South of Turkey. The ocean seemed pretty lifeless. Here in Australia, you will come across all sorts of fish in almost any sea situation. Over there, I think we only noticed 1-2 species and barely any of them even, and this was amongst bays and rocky areas that would be full of life here.

(The good part was swimming around without worrying about sharks though...)

The sad, unfortunate, fact is that some countries' (Japan, China, for two examples, EDIT: but certainly some citizens from nearly all countries) citizens care far less about the sustainability of their fishing, and more about having what they desire, when they desire. Should the price go up due to under-population? They're OK with that too.

There are already systems in-place for tracking sustainable fish, and ensuring that each fish was sustainably harvested (my gulf wild is one such: http://mygulfwild.com/), but until the consumers in most markets demand them, they won't take off.

For our family, we have a simple rule: we don't buy fish (based on species) that aren't as a rule sustainably harvested. Dead-stop. We don't buy them at restaurants either. Dead-stop. We prefer fish we catch ourselves, over all other fish, and secondly fish that are harvested and sold through markets which monitor for illegal behavior, where we know the operators of the market.

I rarely eat fish from a restaurant where the chef doesn't know the chain from which that fish was supplied. Around here, there are enough good fish places and markets that a chef can't argue they couldn't know.

This is not actually privatization; it is just outsourcing regulatory authority. Under real privatization, private parties are free to waste the resources they own.

The theory is that they won't, since it would harm their long-term ability to create value. The reality is that individual humans only need so much money, so decision-makers are often perfectly willing to sacrifice long-term value as long as they, themselves, collect enough personal money in the short term.

Exactly!

And without privatization, private parties are free to waste the resources everyone else owns.

How does that help non-crop fish? They don't have direct economic value to the private fishing company.

What happens when the private fishery comes to the conclusion that it is a lost cause, so their best interest is to fish as fast as possible?

2) If they decide to fish as fast as possible, then at least it's at least identical to the status quo :)

First, do no harm

Secondly, blessing "fish as fast as possible" as being within the rules, makes it an acceptable practice. It's the same way the clean water act protects polluters as long as they are within the acceptable limits. It doesn't matter if the acceptable limits still cause damage -- they are protected.

Finally, I'm not sure how private industry could enforce their policies in their section of the sea. Property right enforcement is one activity that even most libertarians believe the gov't needs to carry out. Some people state that is the only thing gov't should provide.

Of course, PETA would undoubtedly find that even more offensive.

The highest bidder can police the fish themselves. If they fail to police the fish, their ownership is revoked and the rights are re-auctioned.

Nice in theory, but in practice the highest bidder often ends up as such a strong political lobby that it prevails on government to do the policing, fights tooth-and-nail against quotas, and rights are almost never revoked. Coming from Ireland I remember fishing lobbyists being only slightly less powerful and vocal than the farming lobby and I see no reason to think that privatization will change this - it's been the same in every other coastal region I've ever lived.

As for revocation, consider the case of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. In 1972 the US Department of the Interior bought the land the oyster farm is on and agreed a 40 year lease for the oyster farm, after which the plan was to shut everything down and let it revert to nature. Another company bought the farm in 2004, knowing full well the terms of the lease. When the lease ran out on schedule in 2012 they ran around seeking extensions via Congress and then suing the government. After having their case rejected, they're now preparing to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court. See http://www.marinij.com/ci_24909002/court-denies-drakes-bay-o...

Now, this is the opposite of your privatization scenario on its face as the government bought the land with the intent of creating a nature reserve, but it is a good example of a private actor voluntarily entering into a straightforward contractual arrangement with the government, much like the purchase of a fisheries license. 40 years is a pretty long lease period - well over a generation, more than enough time to plan for the economic dislocation of the lease expiration. But the leaseholder is fighting this like the injustice of the century, claiming that he had an expectation for lease renewal, the government is screwing him etc. Now I have no opinion about the oyster fishery itself (which I believe is well-run), nor do I think the department of the interior is necessarily great to do business with - for all I know they could have given the business owner a completely mistaken impression about the prospects of lease renewal. But the fact remains that the contractual arrangement was spelled out very clearly a long time ago, and losing your lease on a commercial property is the sort of thing that happens in business.

If a clear-cut case like this can end up dragging through the Supreme Court, I have little hope of more ambiguous and hard-to-score cases involving offshore fisheries being any better. Privatization alone is not the answer, although it is certainly a valid part of the answer. It won't work without onerous regulatory power as well.

One of the wonderful side effects of fishery privatization is the creation of a new lobby which does battle against the existing fish lobbies. See, the ultimate goal is to get less fish pulled from the ocean - at least in the short term until fish populations recover. So the fish lobbies are going to go absolutely insane! Imagine all of the out of work fishermen - and not only in Ireland, but Nigeria, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia: These are people who literally depend upon the overfishing and plundering of the ocean for their livelihoods.

These organizations (the fishermen, loosely) are already influencing the political process. They are one of the reasons why the current regulations utterly fail. [Remember: It's not as if we just noticed this overfishing problem yesterday. Governments have been trying to 'solve' this issue for decades using traditional statist regulations - and of course failing, predictably.]

We already know that privatization of food sources works in practice. All we've got to do is apply what works so incredibly well on land to the oceans.

Edit: Oh, and if the fish lobby gets the government to help with policing? That'd be great! [even if not ideal] Isn't the whole goal here to force 3rd world trawlers from pulling out too many fish? You're going to need a lot of guns to do that!

Edit2: We are completely fine with the government protecting private farms on land. What's wrong, philosophically, with government protection of private fisheries in the ocean?

Seems like you skipped a step there. It works with quite varying degrees of success, not unlike regulation.

Edit2: We are completely fine with the government protecting private farms on land. What's wrong, philosophically, with government protection of private fisheries in the ocean?

Nothing, except not all of them are any given government's to give away (because you can fish in international waters), and because the task and costs involved are significantly different.

I'm not opposed to your idea, but you're hand-waving it as a panacea without thinking about the real issues. People have been doing this since the 1970s but we've still got a lot of problems, so it's clearly not a magic bullet. See for example http://cironline.org/reports/system-turns-us-fishing-rights-... (and no, I don't especially care about the corporations v. cottage industry frame, there's just some good summary information in the article).

2) Due to the international nature of fisheries, they would have to be sold by the UN or another ad hoc international body. (The current regional-international fishery management orgs could probably work)

3) Catch shares are not related to fishery privatization. Catch shares are simply the most efficient method of carrying out traditional regulatory limits. The goal of fishery privatization is to turn around the fish population collapse, not sustain the collapse (which is what traditional regulation does).