[PEN-L:29915] RE: Re: over-fishing

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:29913] Re: over-fishing

I wrote:>> It's pretty basic economics that the existence of so-called "common-property resources" such as fish leads to over-fishing, the depletion of stocks. (For these CPRs, there is no  way to define individual property rights unless some  capitalist monopolizes the ocean, so they are "common property.")<<

Ian writes: > The overwhelming number of fish stocks of the sea are non-property rather than "cpr". They are in a Lockean SON as far as international law is concerned. Would that we could get some common property regimes going to ameliorate a disaster. The concept of private property has no inherent "efficiency" advantages on the scale of such large -and mobile- ecosystems.<

I thought I said that. Oceanic fish are officially treated as the world's common property, but the countries of the world haven't gotten together to deal with the over-fishing problem (due to the power of the fisheries, of course). But I repeat myself...

It's not the Lockean "state of nature," since he assumed that in that "state," people would respect others' life, liberty, and property. It's more like his "state of war" (or Hobbes' state of nature).

JD