The majesty of the commons: will an ever-expanding market kill prosperity?

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan
• Position: "Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth"

SAY WE WAKE UP ONE MORNING AND DIScover we'll be getting a new bill each month--for air. The Bush administration decided to privatize the air; corporations will now own it and charge for its use.

Lawrence Lindsey, the White House economic advisor, hails the move as a "potent stimulus" and a big boost for the GDP. Alan Greenspan offers assurances that any inflationary effects will be minor. The rest of us, meanwhile, would feel stunned, and violated in a way that would be hard to express. Pay for air? What gives them the right to do that? The air is ours, isn't it? But what exactly would we mean by that?

The question is not fantasy. In recent decades, the market has been penetrating into realms previously thought off-limits. It is claiming every last inch of physical and psychological space, from the outer reaches of the solar system to the most intimate interiors of daily experience. Billboards in the heavens, pharmaceutical manipulation of thoughts and moods--through genetic engineering, corporations even are claiming ownership to the genetic code of life itself. If life, then why not the air that sustains life?

The train is coming. So it's a good time to pause and ask some basic questions, and that's what David Bollier has done in Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. The title might sound hyperbolic, but it is apt. The process Bollier describes is everywhere but rarely noticed. The lens through which the nation's opinion establishment views the world--the lens of conventional economics--covers the process with a gauzy and romantic haze. The market is "expanding." That's "growth" and therefore automatically good.

What the market is expanding into, and the consequences of such expansion, barely get a second thought. The process is theft, moreover, because it involves the commandeering of wealth and not just the creation of it. Who owns the genetic materials that pharmaceutical companies are taking and patenting from native cultures? Who owns the atmosphere that polluters use as a dump? Who owns the quiet that cell phones take from us on the subways, or the civic spaces that get branded with corporate names?

Such things are expropriation by market means. They are takings; and that the keepers of high-level opinion do not see this--that they persist in viewing the concept of "taking" as only what government does, and not what corporations sometime do as well--is part of why a book like Silent Theft is necessary.

The book is not just another denunciation of corporate abuse. It is not a call for more and bigger government, nor a tract against growth. To the contrary, it reveals a pattern that should alarm the staunchest capitalist: that continued encroachment of this kind could destroy the sources of our future prosperity and well-being.

Silent Theft raises the kinds of questions that Washington typically represses. Is the continued extension of the market in time and space truly the path to human happiness, always and forever? Is the only alternative what The Wall Street Journal editorial page says it is--an all-encompassing Soviet-style state? Perhaps most important, is it really true that what lies outside the market has no real value until corralled within it; that the market improves and adds value to everything it touches?

Most Americans probably would answer "No." Yet the belief is a bedrock economic assumption, the subtext of virtually all economic reporting and commentary "The rhetoric of the market presumes that everything should be ... bought, sold and owned," Bollier observes. And this, he contends, is wrong. Sometimes it is better to leave things alone, or to encourage their development in ways...