The idea of the commons is outside the realm of markets. It's like saying my local garbage man is a failure because he did nothing about the orbiting space garbage.
Markets deal with private property and the fact that economists try to mix that with the idea of the commons tells us more about their shallow theories than it does markets.
Heh, I fully get that that's just one person's opinion on some internet site, but....when I was struck when I read that last line at how dismal a world it would be to live in, if we had to view literally all our engagement with the world through the lens of the transaction.
Going for a walk? (Are there sidewalks anymore?) Have you negotiated with each individual sidewalk owner for right of passage? No? Well, then, use the street instead. Oh, forgot to renew your street use card? Guess you're stuck, unless your buddy lends you something to get to the private park nearby. Lucky thing you saved some extra breathable air coupons for the exertion you'll expend on the pickup basketball game. No commons, after all.
I get it, the dude's handle is "ancap". Still, I'm pretty grateful that this is a pretty fringe view, especially when he lays it out so bare, "no commons."
There's a neat section of the highly enjoyable book Wall St. by Doug Henwood (free at http://www.wallstreetthebook.com/WallStreet.pdf) which discusses why "the firm" exists. Basically turning your "going for a walk" scenario back onto the corporate world like so:
Why is it that companies with fixed payrolls, buildings, etc., exist? In a fully marketized world, we would contract, daily, with providers for all services, including day-to-day secretarial services, copying services, coding, document and report production, research, everything.
Starting at page 249:
"In a famous paper that was largely responsible for his winning of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, Ronald H. Coase ... posed the question, largely unasked in classical economics, of why firms exist. [...] Not every aspect of economic activity can be encompassed by the price system. [...] In such cases, the price system hardly enters the picture. Or, in Coase’s concise definition, “the distinguishing mark of the firm is the supersession of the price mechanism.” But under capitalism, the scope of conscious planning rarely extends beyond a firm’s boundaries..."
The whole section is well worth reading. Henwood engages many objections of armchair economists.
>Why is it that companies with fixed payrolls, buildings, etc., exist? In a fully marketized world, we would contract, daily, with providers for all services, including day-to-day secretarial services, copying services, coding, document and report production, research, everything.
I don't find that compelling at all. There's no reason to think pricing needs to be done daily, or that cost can't be aggregated. You could only consider this the "supersession of the price mechanism" if you believe your time has no value.
Granted, I didn't read the whole book, but I don't see the point addressed anywhere in that section. All I see is unsupported assertions about "power structures".
You're being facetious but I will address a few of your points regardless.
>Going for a walk? (Are there sidewalks anymore?) Have you negotiated with each individual sidewalk owner for right of passage?
If you like walking around your neighborhood, then you'd probably live in a neighborhood where you'd either have ownership rights or an easement to walk around a bit.
If you like walking around at work, you'll probably want to work somewhere that has those opportunities available.
Around businesses? Obviously every business can make their own rules about their property but I would guess most businesses would welcome people, potential customers, walking in front of their store.
As for roads I will let the reader research that out; there's been plenty written on private roads. Private roads predate our current public road system so I'm not sure what's so unfathomable about them.
>Lucky thing you saved some extra breathable air coupons
Air is probably too abundant for people to want to try to commercialize. It would be a failing business.
>I was struck when I read that last line at how dismal a world it would be to live in
It's unfortunate that you lack the imagination. In the past several centuries we have seen a level of personal freedom which is unprecedented. With that increased freedom we have the highest standard of living, ever. Now when someone comes along and theorizes on how we might increase that freedom you seem to fear the possibility of change--like the slave afraid of what's beyond his plantation.
Luckily, this isn't really written for you. There will be those who will read this and wonder "Could we really make private roads work?", they will do the research and come to their own conclusion. You may think this fringe, and it may be, but it does not take long for the fringe to grow.
Heh, way to sell the idea, telling me I "lack the imagination" to understand it.
You're offering me more freedom when I now have to schlep around seeking easements to walk on the sidewalk (or shop around for a neighborhood where walkable sidewalks are part of the package!!)?
It's more freedom to have to fit all of my interactions with the world into a transactional model of "someone owns everything and I have to work the price of accessing/using everything into my mental model of the world"?
You can say it's somehow more free to have to seek easements to walk on sidewalks, or that I merely lack the imagination to understand how this is so, but to that I'd say, pull the other one. It's got bells on, and it's yours for $4.97. (Air not included.)
You have shown not even the slightest intellectual curiosity on how things might work in a system without a commons, and instead have mocked it. Pretending to be offended by my comment on the "lack of imagination" is disingenuous at best.
You're really not trying to sell me on the idea here.
Show a little enthusiasm. If "you have to negotiate with every homeowner for sidewalk access on your way to the store" is such a good idea and leads to expansive new freedoms, it shouldn't be at all hard to make a positive case for it.
So, make a positive case for it! Show me how my freedom's increased in this situation! Instead you're just whining and insulting me. If this is a good idea, surely you can do better than that.
Especially since, on a techie libertarian-leaning forum like this, I'm even asking you to make a case. Go into a suburb somewhere and tell people about this and they'd look at you like you had a third arm growing out of your head. I'm the easy audience here.
"It's unfortunate that you lack the imagination. In the past several centuries we have seen a level of personal freedom which is unprecedented. With that increased freedom we have the highest standard of living, ever. Now when someone comes along and theorizes on how we might increase that freedom you seem to fear the possibility of change--like the slave afraid of what's beyond his plantation."
Except you're not theorizing on how to increase freedom. You're theorizing on how to carve people into separate little boxes. There is no freedom whatsoever there. Only servitude to the corporate masters who would control things.
Well, that's just it. It doesn't seem more free to me to have to think about getting out my wallet each time I go for a walk...or negotiating a series of easements all along my planned walk to the corner store!
It seems like taking away all common resources (land, air, though ancap says air would remain common) just adds a whole new layer of mental burden to engaging with the world.
Like, for me, going out and buying stuff or negotiating for it isn't fun, isn't how I'd choose to spend my time. Telling me that suddenly I have to do it for literally everything, and that's an increase of freedom, that makes no sense.
I said no such thing. I said it is too abundant to commercialize. It can still be owned.
>just adds a whole new layer of mental burden to engaging with the world.
If everything was made public (communism) you could be free from a vast number of other mental burdens which we are currently plagued with.
I don't buy it. We have a system around us now with all sorts of burdens and processes that are just part of life (you mean I have to stop through the checkout line before leaving the store--oh the horror of those evil capitalists who are trying to enslave us!). People adapt and are used to the system they are in.
>Like, for me, going out and buying stuff or negotiating for it isn't fun, isn't how I'd choose to spend my time.
Yet you do this already. I would wager a lot of your leisure time is spent on the private property of others, playing by their rules. Even the websites you go to and the video games you play have their rules and terms of service.
As I said, I'm grateful that yours is such a fringe view. It's still jarring to see someone actually posit "no commons would be an improvement," but the more I read what you have to say, it jut gets sillier and sillier.
Especially since you're trying to bolster support for your claim that "you gain freedom by having to negotiate easements with anyone whose sidewalk you'd like to use" with the new claim that "it's just like buying stuff at the grocery store!". Well, ok, except it isn't.
But hey, you know, if your ideas were so compelling, it seems like you'd be able to find a neighborhood somewhere where you could convince people to try out the experiment: "everyone sell/negotiate access to sidewalks for everyone else".
I mean, if it's such a good idea, surely you could get some people to try it, and then they'd see what a lovely new feeling of freedom they enjoyed, and the idea would spread from there?
Come on, ancap, let's see your fringe ideas grow and take off. Enough philosophizing, let's see this thriving new free society of sidewalk easements! After a few years of sidewalk easement negotiating under their belts, the people in your experimental neighborhood should have some pretty compelling "new feelings of freedom" results to share.
In fact, this really doesn't seem like so big a challenge at all. So, where's the beef?
>I mean, if it's such a good idea, surely you could get some people to try it, and then they'd see what a lovely new feeling of freedom they enjoyed, and the idea would spread from there?
No need. There's already communities where the roads and sidewalks are all owned through an HOA. There are communities with private roads yet no HOA.
Are you suggesting those who live in these neighborhoods have some extraneous burden over them as they go for a stroll through their neighborhood?
You say fringe, but they already exist in reality.
If HOAs are your idea of expansive new freedom, I think you can probably do better than that.
HOAs get a really bad rep for absolutely limiting the freedoms of the people who live there--from things like restrictions on what colors they can paint their houses to restrictions on what kind of political signage they can put up. HOAs are so completely recognized as little hotbeds of conformity (and abuse of authority, like all these stories about when HOA boards get it in for one of their residents, and end up booting that person out of their home!), it's actually surprising that you're positing them as sources of more freedom for the inhabitants.
And, also, I don't know how many people in these HOAs you're talking about chose them for their freedom-maximizing non-government-maintained sidewalks (which, to them, are of course de-facto commons anyway!).
I imagine if you asked any of them, they wouldn't even think about it, just that they'd pay a sidewalk tax one way or another.
I dunno, the whole thing keeps sounding stupid. Not that I lack imagination, but that you've gotten ahold of some dumb ideas and aren't letting go.
Only by the ignorant who couldn't define freedom to begin with. If you have freedom than you also have the right to limit your freedom by engaging in contracts with others. HOAs are nothing more than this, and everyone who lives in an HOA chose to be subject to the terms of the contract.
To claim you have less freedom under an HOA (something you voluntarily choose) than you would under a local government (something forced upon you) is ridiculous.
Well of course you can have less freedom under something you choose than under something imposed upon you. I can sit around all day, doing nothing, and the government is doing nothing to restrict my freedom. They're not telling me to go anywhere or do anything. They're not restricting my freedom at all! If I choose to go get a job, though, now I gotta show up somewhere, do what someone tells me, etc. That's something I chose voluntarily, but gives me much less freedom than the alternative.
But I'm beginning to get where this would all go--you're going to play word games and redefine "freedom" until the answer is "everything is owned by someone" (or, I'd venture to guess, "freedom means whatever ancap says") is somehow maximally free.
Well, of course, ownership itself is a severe curtailment of freedom. I can't just exist in my body anywhere I want, because some places are "owned" by someone and that person could eject my body from "their" space. The very idea of a private space is such an assault on my freedom to walk and exist where I want, I don't see how there could be less freedom in the world, once everything is owned. This whole "no commons" thing seems about as un-free as it's possible to imagine.
Unless, of course, we all negotiate to give everyone access to a number of well-demarcated spaces and resources. We could call them "common" places or "the commons"! Ha!
But like I said, I think this little chat is about to turn into dumb word games, so I'll step away here.
"Only by the ignorant who couldn't define freedom to begin with."
Yeah, no. Having an unelected, compulsory board governing the area is not freedom.
"HOAs are nothing more than this, and everyone who lives in an HOA chose to be subject to the terms of the contract."
Often times not, as one cannot buy houses in an area without being a member of the HOA. Further, there's the whole "no voting on people running the HOA" thing.
"To claim you have less freedom under an HOA (something you voluntarily choose) than you would under a local government (something forced upon you) is ridiculous."
I get to vote on members of my local government. I don't get to vote on members of the HOA.
>Yeah, no. Having an unelected, compulsory board governing the area is not freedom.
Whether the officers are elected or not (or whether there are officers at all) would be determined by the founding documents of the HOA. But it is definitely not compulsory.
>Often times not, as one cannot buy houses in an area without being a member of the HOA.
That doesn't make it compulsory. If you buy a house in an established HOA you chose to be subject to it. If you don't want to be subject to it, you don't buy the house. Saying you should have the right to buy a house in an HOA area and not be subject to it is saying you believe contracts should be non-binding, that is, worthless.
>I get to vote on members of my local government. I don't get to vote on members of the HOA.
As pointed out above, an HOA can have whatever structure the founders want it to have, or whatever the current decision makers amend it to be. As a tangent note, democracy does not define freedom.
That's disingenuous to pretend its not compulsory, just don't buy the house! We all understand it to mean, to live in a certain area its compulsory to belong to the HOA. Living in an area can be important for lots of reasons. Buying a house is a contract between the seller and the buyer regarding personal property. To be required to include a third party (the HOA) is strange. You don't have to belong to the NSX fan club to own an NSX.
The whole point of HOAs is to enforce somebody's personal preferences on their neighbors. Its annoying, infringes on my personal space, and promotes a weird philosophy of groupthink in what I consider an un-American way.
>That's disingenuous to pretend its not compulsory, just don't buy the house! We all understand it to mean, to live in a certain area its compulsory to belong to the HOA.
What you are saying is the equivalent of "I don't like wearing a shirt. Walmart wants to compel me to wear a shirt to go in their store and it's a flagrant un-freedom and un-American policy".
Similar to buying a home in an established HOA, when you buy certain pieces of software, or use countless websites, you agree to their Terms of Service. There is no compulsion involved because you make the decision on whether to limit yourself. Everyone who chooses to do so, does it because they believe they will be better off engaging in the agreement than not.
>Buying a house is a contract between the seller and the buyer regarding personal property. To be required to include a third party (the HOA) is strange.
There's nothing strange about it at all. When you buy a house you have to ensure the seller has clear claim to the title. You have to make sure there are not any liens on the property. Is that strange to involve those third parties? Hardly.
When an HOA is formed, those in the neighborhood contractually agree to do certain things and not do other things. They do so of their own accord. They also agree that the HOA has a claim on the house so that when sold, the contract remains in force. Do you disagree with the concept of contracts?
Except, again, that's ignoring the fact that I don't own WalMart. And the HOA doesn't own my house. And I was never part of the HOA, yet am required (compelled) to join and abide by it.
Its a strange old conservative view that neighbors can dictate what color to paint your front door, to suit some groupthink. Maybe this is a liberal vs conservative issue?
Contracts are irrelevant - to be valid a contract has to have something called 'value received' in exchange for stipulations. You can't just write anything in a contract - for instance, the penalty of violating a term is generally a payment of money. What does it cost to get out of the HOA?
The HOA doesn't need ownership. They have a valid contractual claim to limit the use of the property based on the person who originally owned the property and elected to make it a part of the HOA. Any buyer accepts those limitations.
When you purchase a piece of property you are not always getting rights to everything you might think. You may not have mineral or water rights. The property may have an easement in place.
>And I was never part of the HOA, yet am required (compelled) to join and abide by it.
You are never forced to join an HOA. A piece of property is part of an HOA or it is not. You choose whether you want that property or not. There is no force and no compulsion involved.
What you said, up there, is basically that some owner in the distant past could make a contract with an HOA that, despite the property changing hands, grants the HOA some power over that property forever.
What on earth kind of freedom is that? If I want to buy a house that some previous owner inducted into an HOA, and I don't want to join the HOA, why should I have to? That sounds like government, but worse, because I can't vote the bums out!
And if you're about to say "you don't have to buy a home within an HOA neighborhood, buy one without," well, what if I want to buy this house, but don't want to join the HOA? Why should some private organization be able to force me to join them for no reason other than some previous owner had an agreement with them?
You know, the more we explore the HOA idea, the worse it seems like being any kind of freedom at all.
How about it, ancap? Gonna rethink your ideas at all?
>What you said, up there, is basically that some owner in the distant past could make a contract with an HOA that, despite the property changing hands, grants the HOA some power over that property forever.
>What on earth kind of freedom is that? If I want to buy a house that some previous owner inducted into an HOA, and I don't want to join the HOA, why should I have to?
Do you disagree with the concept of someone owning mineral rights and someone else owning the land for the same piece of property?
Getting very strained. The HOA's entire point is to interfere in your private enjoyment of your private property. Not abstract rights to something underground that you don't care about.
I assume that he's referring to the private roads in America, which frankly, were generally good, until they were crowded out by the tax-funded roads that were, in many cases, literally built right next to the private roads.
It's often hard to parse history without hearing it through the bias of the historians, but while many private roads had a hard time finding a profit, they weren't entirely unsuccessful, and they definitely weren't unpopular.
>The commons are where we all live, breathe, work, and play. To say they don't matter is to completely ignore what it is to be human.
I can't speak for your life but I spend the vast majority of my time on private property--including where I live, the air I breath, when I'm at work and when I play--not in any commons.
Neither. Even by today's property rights, the owner of a piece of land is granted x hundred feet of sky above their property, making the air breathed there privately owned.
I don't think it does that at all. You have rights to the space above your property, you have severe limitations on your right to modify the make up of the molecules that make up the air.
Would private ownership provide some means to prevent poisoning that atmosphere?
You are correct that the ownership of the air above and around your property is severely limited when compared to the ownership of say land, water or minerals. 19th century courts abandoned the concept that factory smoke was a trespass on someone's air and weakened the concept of property rights in regards to ownership of air, ushering in this modern day tragedy of the commons. Obviously had the courts made the opposite rule, the amount of air pollution we face today would be much smaller.
Seeing as someone would have to be physically present on your property to breath your air, I'm not sure what would make kicking a trespasser off your land so exciting. There's probably videos on YouTube showing how people have handled trespassers on their property.
Or I could lean over, which would put my feet off your property, and my nostrils on the edge of your property, which would still allow me to suck the air off from your property.
Or, I could simply rent a glider or a hot air balloon, and float over your property.
Since air molecules have fluid boundaries, and since it is a non-scarce and fungible resource, the concept of ownership of air around your property does not mean ownership of specific molecules.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN. You've done this repeatedly, and we ban users who do that, so please don't do it again. Instead, please (re-)read the site rules and follow them. That means posting civilly and substantively (or not at all) from now on.
Markets deal with private property and the fact that economists try to mix that with the idea of the commons tells us more about their shallow theories than it does markets.
In my view, there should be no commons.