"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." Winston Churchill
George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular bi-weekly KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 13 April 2012.]
Years ago when our kids were in early grade school, mom would bake a big batch of delicious chocolate chip cookies every Sunday evening for the kids’ lunches in the coming week. The cookies went into a big cookie jar that lived on the white-tiled kitchen counter. The Monday lunches always got their full complement of cookies and so did the Tuesday lunches. But mysteriously by Tuesday evening the cookie jar was empty. Well, it wasn’t a mystery at all, each kid took every opportunity to reach in the jar and grab a few when going through the kitchen.
What to do to make the cookies last the whole week? I had just finished reading an essay by a college professor named Garrett Hardin titled ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, and the solution came like a flash. It turns out that we had made the cookie jar into a commons, and as the good professor made clear, all commons are destroyed by their consumers. All we had to do was to divide up the cookies into bags with each kid’s name on it, and each could do what they wanted with their own stash. Miraculously the cookies lasted the whole week as each managed their own supply – they even used the cookies to barter for things like trading chores. The main thing was that on Sunday nights the cookies immediately had owners who managed them through the week to their own benefit.
Dr Hardin was a renowned social scientist whose ideas were variously embraced and vilified by both the right and the left. He formalized the idea of a commons as a commonly held and consumed resource like the pasture land of a village in which the local inhabitants would let their milk cows graze (think of the Boston commons). The bad part of a commons is that the incremental cost of consuming an increased share of the commons is not paid by that consumer.
Hardin told the story of a commons that had a carrying capacity of ten cows, each one belonging to a different family. Soon one of them decided to get a little extra income by introducing another cow. So now eleven cows ate the grass and each one got a little less but that didn’t matter in the scheme of things – yet. Soon another family saw the benefit of an extra cow and added theirs. This was rapidly picked up by the other families, and twenty skinnier cows were eating less grass and giving less milk. It didn’t take long for the third cows to be added in the attempt to make up for the poor milk production. And you can see, that before long, the commons was bare of grass, the cows didn’t give milk and had to be sold or slaughtered, and everyone lost.
But while the game went on, if you decided to be a good citizen and not add another cow, you immediately got penalized. That is what Hardin was trying to tell people, altruistic behavior doesn’t work in sustaining a commons, especially when it is consumed at near its carrying capacity. And so the commons are eventually destroyed. And again we have the problem of what to do.
The obvious answer is to police the commons. Put in place a bureaucracy with regulatory and policing powers that sets and enforces the standards. This is how we have come to deal with commons such as our air, publicly owned lands, rivers, and also social services. The problem with the consumption policing is that it is expensive and its expense becomes unaffordable over time. And it is very often totally ineffective, sometimes even accelerating the destruction of the commons. Here we all know which commons we are talking about – think of Medicare and Medicaid, think of the various welfare programs which compel school dropouts and unemployment, think of public service employee pension agreements.
These are all commons that have broken their cost-to-consumer feedback mechanisms as taught by Hardin. Voters and politicians each consume these government commons for their own purposes. And each one takes a bit more benefit for himself without having to bear the cost of that increment, and thereby leaves the commons more depleted for the next round of consumers, until finally it becomes untenable to maintain, and it is destroyed.
Socialism is a form of governance based on an entire society unsustainably consuming from diverse commons set up to provide every possible benefit from cradle to grave. But somehow it always leads to a tragic end when that personal responsibility link is replaced with the expectation of altruism or the police.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears. These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
