The Political Inquirer

The New York Times is finally getting something dead on accurate: to save a species, serve it for dinner. It only makes sense when you think about it. Why is overfishing a problem? Because no one owns the fish–it is simply a “first come first serve” problem of the “commons”. Everyone wants as much as they can with little incentive to repopulate the fish area, because then other people will just come and take the fruits of your labor.

Privatized oceans would solve overfishing. Other land species don’t go extinct when they are allowed to live on private land and often serve some purpose, because there is a profit incentive to keep them around. Mankind will never run out of trees, cows, or chickens because there is incentive to regrow them on private land.

But we’ll kill off hawks and eagles because they’re on public land and there is no incentive to raise them.