George Rebane

[This commentary appeared in the op-ed pages of the 5nov25 Union here https://www.theunion.com/news/ideas-opinions-george-rebane-california-s-tragedy-of-the-commons/article_2e0ff575-d398-436c-bf93-87945880edce.html ]

Garret Hardin published ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ in the December 1968 issue of Science, and introduced us to the reality of how a valuable but limited resource owned in common will be depleted or destroyed.  The core concept is that “each individual will benefit from using more of the resource, resulting in the cumulative effect of everyone acting this way will lead to the destruction or depletion of the resource for everyone.”  (For more, google ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ or download https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of_the_commons.pdf )

Our Founders were aware of this effect when it came to governance – specifically, in the dangers of organizing a society as a democracy.  They realized that there would immediately rise a cohort of the dissatisfied or ‘have-nots’ who would vote to garner unearned wealth and benefits from the state and from their richer ‘haves’.  The Founders’ solution was to avoid an unstable democracy and instead bequeath us a constitutional federal republic.  Such governance would mediate volatile and often managed public wants with a layer of elected representatives who managed the state’s public assets, and also minimally yet mindfully the nation’s economy.  In short, it would eliminate as commons our publicly owned resources and the assets of our wealthier neighbors.  We have enjoyed the fruits of their wisdom for over two centuries, until things have recently begun to fray from the political edges of our republic.

Unfortunately, democracy invites the less-read with a simple yet beguiling siren song which power hungry, greedy, and unscrupulous politicians have mastered. Their own particular commons is the voting public of modest means whose favors (i.e. votes) can be bought with government monies dispensed under prominently advertised and carefully tailored laws and regulations.  Such political leaders know for certain that once people get used to any kind of government largesse, they will not vote to deny themselves but only vote for those who will get them more from where that came from.

California is the nation’s poster-child for operating such a government commons enjoying over thirty years under an effective one-party monopoly.  In doing so the state now leads the nation with a rogue gallery of statistics that strains its big-government competitors like New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.  California ranks worst or among the nation’s worst in its rates of unemployment, crime, illegal aliens, homelessness, K-12 scholastics, affordability, poverty, housing shortage, economic outlook, personal freedom, regulations, taxes, environmental pollution, fiscal stability, exodus rate, …, and, of course, 50^th in the overall quality of life.  All of these are invisible to the dominant half of our electorate who year after year continue practice Einsteinian insanity in the voting booth.

To demonstrate how effective these policies have been in the eyes of its practicing proponents, California’s governor is preparing for his 2028 presidential run promising to replicate California’s good fortune across the land.  And the tailwind for his enterprise of disastrous public policies is the state’s voters, those of our neighbors who demonstrably make up the nation’s least read and most ignorant collection of American citizens.