Saving the Commons in an Age of Plunder

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12143
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Author: H. William Batt
• Date: 01 March 2016

Saving the Commons in an Age of Plunder

By H. WILLIAM BATT*

ABSTRACT. Land ownership, as commonly understood today,

originated with the enclosure movement during the English Tudor era

almost four centuries ago. Karl Polanyi referred to this “propertization”

of nature as the “great transformation.” That land, water, and air was a

social commons is now archaic and forgotten, and with it the classical

economic concept of rent, which was, in theory, once paid to royalty as

the earth’s guardian. Garrett Hardin’s article, “The Tragedy of the

Commons,” raised alarm about the abuse and loss of this realm, and he

recommended constraints and privatization to prevent this. Most

people view titles to landed property much as they do their household

goods, but Henry George saw that the earth should be seen as a

common resource and its value taxed to benefit everyone. This would

restore economic equilibrium to market exchanges and pay for

government services. The capture of natural resource rents can

supplant taxes on wages and capital goods, and it comports with all

textbook principles of sound tax theory. This policy can be the modern

replacement for the commons, and implementing resource rent capture

is both economically and technically feasible.

Garrett Hardin’s Lament

Almost 50 years ago, Science Magazine published ecologist Garrett

Hardin’s (1968) article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” now arguably

the most widely cited and reprinted scientific article in recent history.

As both history and parable, it purported to show how unattended and

unprotected natural resources were exploited and ultimately destroyed

by villagers in 16

th

-century Tudor England. The context was the

*Bill Batt was a university professor until 1981 and then served on the New York

State Legislative Tax Study Commission until 1992. He now dedicates his time to

research, publication, and advocacy of Georgist thought and serving on its various

boards. An earlier version of this presentation was given at an Albany Torch Club din-

ner on May 5, 2008.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 2 (March, 2016).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12143

V

C2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

enclosure movement that drove peasants off the land into the cities and

provided cheap labor for the ensuing Industrial Revolution. “The

commons” was well understood as the shared land, usually pasture, that

provided the space for grazing animals (Polanyi 1944). Hardin recounted

in metaphoric terms an explanation of an ecological history of resource

overshoot that has since been replicated countless times over.

The article resonatedwith a public newly awakening to environmen-

tal dangers. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carsons (1962), had been pub-

lished just six years earlier. There was also a growing public fascination

with economics—the Nobel prize in economics was added the follow-

ing year. (The Nobel prize in economics was not one of the original

1895 prizes; it was initiated only in 1968, and many now believe this

was a mistake.) Hardin’s article also offered, unintentionally, the perfect

corroboration to neoclassical economics,which holds that the most sta-

ble, productive, and efficient market system is one in which resources

are protected by privatization, and where the public sector, vulnerable

to exploitation and abuse, should be reduced to a minimum.

Neoclassical economic theory holds that wealth is best produced by

competing interests vying with one another in open markets, with pri-

ces adjusting to supply and demand in ways that assure that all partici-

pants and interests are served according to their enterprise and merit. It

is a self-regulating equilibrium system, assuming that human beings are

wholly self-interested. One can trace its roots perhaps to the work of

Bernard Mandeville, a Dutchman who wrote “The Fable of the Bees” in

1705, a notable piece of doggerel to test his English-language prowess.

It describes the division of labor in a hive, the efficiency and indeed the

beauty by which its stability and continuance was assured. Adam Smith,

intrigued and challenged by Mandeville’s insight, incorporated this

model of society in his 1776 work, An Inquiry into the Nature and

Causes of the Wealth of Nations, a work people know little more of

today than by the phrase, “invisible hand.”

Mandeville, Smith, and Hardin have since been invoked, now more

ardently than ever, to ratify the unfolding patterns of economic life, as

the apologists for privatization have continued their ascendancy and

preeminence (Anderson 2003). The unfolding and increasing pace of

the private capture of common wealth has left doubters and opponents

today hard put to respond. Hardin may have been disturbed by the use

Saving the Commons in an Age of Plunder 347