Tragedy of the commons is where the price paid for a resource is merely the extraction cost. The cost of replacing the resource or losing it entirely is ignored.
Private property creates an incentive to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Some things, like fishing rights, can work to preserve resources while still allowing their use. It doesn't work with everything.
Either way, we are going to have to pay more than just the extraction cost if we expect a resource to continue. We are going to have to pay more for fish. Privately owned fishing rights forces action to prevent collapse. Without something like it, the collapse of the resource will surely force a higher price. Just not now, when it actually could help prevent the collapse.
You have mischaracterized the tragedy of the commons. These premises form an intellectualized rationale for crony capitalism, but your suggestion doesn't solve the tragedy of the commons.
Suppose that you hand over Yellowstone to some big company (say, Wal-mart) for a song, because they are politically connected. Now Yellowstone is not part of the commons, so there is no tragedy of the commons, right? No, you have only obscured the problem, but the problem remains. Because Wal-mart has no special interest in preserving it as a common good. If it makes the most money for them to sell Yellowstone piece by piece to ranchers and fast food franchises, or install a lot of fake geysers as if it were the Bellagio, they will do that for their profit, but that doesn't eliminate the negative externalities. Starting with how the land was handed over to someone connected, which is how this kind of intervention you suggest is frequently corrupted.
Just because you own something doesn't mean that you won't spoil it, let alone that you won't spoil things for other people with a legitimate interest if it happens to profit you. More ownership is not a silver bullet.
I think stretchwithme is actually fairly accurate in his portrayal of the tragedy of the commons. The key is the externalities must be internalized.
The problem arises where "privatization" is floated as the answer to a resource overconsumption situation, but where the property boundaries of what is privatized don't encompass the entire set of externalities. You nail this in your criticism of the hypothetical WalMart sale of Yellowstone: "Wal-mart has no special interest in preserving it as a common good." If that's the case, then what was privatized isn't the full set of externalities. And that's where Hardin's tidy solution starts getting messy.
If you're familiar with his works, you'll also note that a second essay of his addresses another challenge: "lifeboat ethics". While privatizing a commons (properly) can address the economic inefficiencies of privatized gains and socialized costs (banking, anyone), what it cannot do is fundamentally increase the carrying capacity of a resource beyond its absolute limits. Yes, it's possibly that privatization might lead to technical optimization, but some limits remain. And ultimately, the ability to provide for people (and ecosystems) has bounds.
There's also the challenge of properly valuing a resource over time, and that's a place where any market solution seems fundamentally limited, at least as presently implemented.
The future value of a resource is reflected in its resale value. Most people don't destroy their homes because they hope to resell them.
Of course, some resources have value simply because they exist. And nobody pays for the privilege of knowing or looking at them. A body of water provides such value to everybody that can look out the window at it.
If we did have ways to "own" the view, better decisions could be made about conflicting potential uses.
Whats clear to me is that deciding these things politically doesn't work well a lot of the time, especially in a system where lobbyists have so much influence.
The future value of a resource is reflected in its resale value.
No: the market's present assessment of an asset's future value with relation to the present state of the market is what its (re)sale price shows.
There is a difference between "price" and "value", and it's a long, long discussion. Smith reflects on it at length in Wealth of Nations, particularly the distinction between the "natural" and "market" prices of commodities: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...
The longer discussion involves much of what is now called economic discourse prior to Smith, see generally Backhouse, The Ordinary Business of Lifehttp://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780691116297-1
In particular, the market can grossly overvalue items (bubbles), and it can put premiums on present consumption during times of crisis (e.g., burning books or artworks for their heat value in wartime).
And there are goods of immense value for which no or limited markets exist: air and water, in general (assuming you can capture these from the skies or collect them from the land).
I wanted to make explicit the distinction between "value" which can denote a range of concepts, and "price" which specifically refers to a sum of money. Since value itself is at question here.
Though yes, "market value" generally equates to "market price". And the pedants will note that "price" needn't be strictly limited to monetary assessments, though that's how I'm using the term here.
You can regulate its use, which is how the San Francisco Bay is managed.
Or you can do neither, which is how the San Francisco Bay used to be managed. Back when it was being filled in to create private property.
The last is clearly not good. One of the other options must be used or you can say good bye to a finite resource.
The Soviets employed the second option for everything, so that clearly doesn't work globally.
You mention national parks. There was a time when these parks were government owned but companies were allowed to extract resources for a song. In fact, that's still going on. So government ownership doesn't prevent crony capitalism.
As far as getting things for a song, again that is crony capitalism, which is totally a product of how we elect our leaders. That is a separate problem that won't be fixed by preventing private ownership of a resource.
You may still ruin a resource that you own, but if you paid a fair price for it, you are destroying your own net worth in the process. When people loot an owned or regulated resource, they suffer no such direct loss.
> Private property creates an incentive to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Not really. Private property is about ownership, not maintenance. We've already seen that privatization isn't generally enough to encapsulate the negative externalities an activity generates. Further, we've actually seen that in some cases privatization creates for new negative externalities or incentives to ignore negative externalities.
Private property in a case like this can also, and perhaps to a higher degree, create an incentive to put the squeeze on it, pump it dry, cash out, and start a business somewhere else in 5 years.
Imagining that self-interest alone creates outcomes that are morally right, or that make sense long term, is a terribly common fallacy.
Private property creates an incentive to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Some things, like fishing rights, can work to preserve resources while still allowing their use. It doesn't work with everything.
Either way, we are going to have to pay more than just the extraction cost if we expect a resource to continue. We are going to have to pay more for fish. Privately owned fishing rights forces action to prevent collapse. Without something like it, the collapse of the resource will surely force a higher price. Just not now, when it actually could help prevent the collapse.