The article “Tradegy of the Commons” was originally written in 1968 by Garrett Hardin for the journal “Science”. Hardin lent his insights to the concept of the commons. The article was written with the topic of world population and its effect on the environment in mind.

In the example of the portion of the article that is so often drawn upon by opponets of any form of common ownership, pasture land is utilized in common by a group of herders. Hardin points out that self interest would prompt one herder to add an extra animal to his fold. The benefit to the particular herdsman would be the full return from the extra animal while the loss to the other common herdsmen is much smaller: the gain of the one individual divided by the total number of herdsmen.

From this, Harden expounds that the individual gains much by overgrazing, while bearing only a small proportion of the overall loss that is shared by all others. The other herders can only come to this same conclusion and add extra animals, ad infinitum. Thus, Hardin’s tragedy occurs: unbridled individual use of a commonly held resource to the detriment of all others and the depletion of a limited common resource.

Hardin later noted that he should have titled the article “The Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons”. He proposed that population density necessitated forceful hierarchical control of what was common to everyone: land, the air, the seas, even the views we all share.

He also stated in his article that “private property or something formally like it” helps to avert this overuse of the commons. But, he failed to differentiate between different facets and types of private property, such as property held by governments or corporations; both examples of collectively owned property.

History has shown us that while top down regulation of property does indeed benefit those who are doing the regulating, it certainly doesn’t insure that the property itself will be left in a condition that could be considered sustainable. There are numerous historical examples of this in fascist and socialist nation states, where authoritarian control of land and resources has resulted in depletion of resources and degradation of land.

Hardin ignored countless sucessful examples of common property evident throughout history that have not relied on vertical control, but rather the horizontal control that is inherent in traditional common ownership. While Hardin noted that it matters little what one takes from the commons when population is low and the effects to others would be minimal, he never acknowledged that common ownership was sucessful in many well populated areas of the world, such as Europe and Asia: where large quantities of common land were maintained in sustainable condition for centuries.

Before the enclosure system was enforced in England, farmers had stewarded the same plots for up to a thousand years and while no system of ownership is perfect, they were still havesting common lands sucessfully when they were rudely interrupted by the enclosure movement. It wasn’t the tradegy of common ownership that ended the commonwealth property form in Europe, as Hardin hinted, but instead a forceful state takeover of the commons and subsequent redistribution of the land to the aristocracy.

Hardin’s assumption and apologist historical accounts would have us believe that the enclosure system was a result of freely spread ideas conjured up to deal with Hardin’s tragic condition. In reality, it was a massive agressive display of eminent domain; nothing other than the confiscation by force of that which was already owned.

What Hardin also omitted was the modern tradegy of collective ownership, which is so much the modus operanda of state capitalism and which certainly was in full force at the time of his writing. The tradegy that occurs repeatedly as forceful governments take over productive land already occupied and appropriate it as state property. Although the state tenure of ownership was quite short, this is identical to what happened during the enclosure period.

Once this alienated property is appropriated by governments, it is either doled out directly in totalitarian regimes through fraudulent title or indirectly through controlled auctions to over capitalized corporations in so called “free market” economies. Once these corporations have title or access, they quickly extract all value and move on to the next parcel. Whether the land remains under title or is rented during the occupation is irrelevant.

This, of course, is not legitimante private property at all. It could very easily be categorized under the umbrella of collective property. Force is initiated by those in power to appropriate the property, which is then placed under the control of the corporation, which is a collective owned by numerous shareholders who have no direct control over the firm or any actual rights to the firm’s assets, including the property.

To be completely truthful, all corporate land acquisition does not occur in this manner, but the fact that much has in the past and the practice is ongoing certainly should bring into question present acquisitions that rely on capital accumulated from past profits derived in this manner.

Collective corporate firms hold direct title or access to vast tracts of land all over the world. While the largest landowners in the world are governments, with few exceptions they allow resource and land corporations free or highly discounted access and/or outright ownership to their property holdings. This is a primary supportive pillar of what is erroneously referred to as the “free market”, the transfer of land wealth from government to the corporation.

As mentioned, the purpose of this land acquisition is not to preserve collectively owned property and resources for a sustained output into the future for its collective owners, but to extract as much value as quickly as possible. In barely a couple of centuries, the corporate collective system of property ownership has depleted land and resources at a rate that common ownership could not accomplish in the span of over a thousand years. Yet, Hardin completely ignored this fact.

This depletion of resource and degradation of land property has occurred with neither the approval or disapproval of the corporation’s entitiled owners, the shareholders. Whether the shareholder approves of the specific use of the corporation’s property is of no concern to the corporation. Decisions are made by a select few at the top of the hierarchical framework, who themselves have little or no working knowledge of the property and who may even live on a distant continent.

This hierarchical chain of command is vertical collectivism in its purest form. Vertical organization lies in very sharp contrast to the horizontal organization of common ownership. This vertical authority is also similar to the type of organizational structure Hardin suggested would solve mankind’s social problems, but hardly the outcome he envisioned. Why would Hardin miss this connection in the first place when he was writing an article on something so related?

Hardin made it perfectly clear he believed that humans cannot come to solutions from their own volition. He distinguishes between choices made by appealing to the conscious of the individual and those made by responsibility, which he saw linked with the use or threat of force. When one believes that vertical authority is necessary {a word he repeatedly used}, it is very convenient to overlook any evidence that shows that coercive vertical authority is bringing to fruition exactly that which you are trying to avoid: the depletion of the world’s resources.

Hardin ends his article by making it perfectly clear that he did not believe that humans could be relied upon to make individual choices that would lead to a sustainable population. He believed that choice should be made by selected leaders or groups who had the authority necessary to accomplish this goal.

With beliefs such as these, it is easy to distill that Hardin would have absolutely no faith in individuals being able to manage land in a sustainable manner, left to their own devices. He obviously conveyed his belief that an overwhelming mass of humanity necessitates a greater, all knowing authority to guide it not only in matters of land and resource management, but interesting enough, in the bedroom.

Hardin obviously holds an elitist worldview: the belief that selected special individuals should be called upon to lead the wandering masses. Yet, he ignored what these special individuals had already done and are presently doing to attain the opposite goal he was interested in. He ignored the past sucesses of common property ownership and blatantly ignored the devestating environmental effect the collective property ownership of governments and large corporations. have caused.