Property rights and fishing
Over at Cafe
Hayek, Don Boudreaux blogs
about fishing and property rights. This got me thinking: What is
necessary for rational allocation of fishing rights? Clearly,
treating the ocean's fish as totally unownable is problematic, as
that sort of thing would naturally lead to overfishing.
At first it seems like a difficult problem. Fish, after all, do
swim. They don't stay in one place, and baring certain fishing
industries which farm, they cannot be pinned in like cows in a
pasture. Trading the right to pull up a certain number of fish sounds
nice, but this could be problematic, because the enforcers of those
rights would be the government. Allowing government to regulate
fishing would not only be problematic because the government is a
poor decision-making body, but it would also allow competing
industries and fisheries to gain advantages through the political
process. It would, in other words, be an invitation for government
failure, and we could only hope that this failure would be less
disastrous than keeping the oceans unownable.
I've got another proposal: What if we gave governments something
simple and easy to enforce, which could not be hijacked by
rent-seekers? What if we just said commercial fishing rights are
geographic in nature, and allowed fishing firms to defend their
sections of the ocean, and nothing else? People might say "Well,
that doesn't solve anything, because the fish swim about and don't
pay any attention to geographic borders". And they'd be correct
on the latter point, but consider the following:
Each firm could, if they wished, over-fish their own territories
in order to acquire more fish before their competitors. However, this
behavior would be irrational. Once the lake becomes property, it can
be traded and leased. As property, it is no longer rational for each
firm to participate in the tragedy of the commons and over-fish.
Instead, the firms can extract more rent from their pieces of the
lake by leasing fishing rights out to each other (or organizations of
their choosing) not simply on a geographical basis, but also based on
fish species and temporal factors. Firms which could make the best
use of the fishing rights would naturally pay more for those rights,
and the best way to make good use of any resource is to conserve it
when necessary. A natural order would emerge, where it is likely that
the rights to each migratory pattern of a certain fish species would
probably be owned by a single firm, preventing overfishing.
As a simple example, consider a lake with only two fishermen, each
of which is very distrusting of the other. Prior to any enforceable
rights, it is in the self-interest of each fisherman to over-fish the
lake in a perpetual tragedy of the commons. However, if enforceable
contracts are created, and half of the lake is given to each
fisherman, something different happens. The fishermen are now able to
come to an agreement they trust (due to another party enforcing their
contracts), and can both agree to limit fishing in order to maximize
both their profits. Government involvement over the individual fish
themselves isn't necessary.
In short, I believe that self-interested, rational actors will
produce a natural order which is most beneficial to them. All they
need to do is to be able to defend their property. But I suppose this is what Hayek would have said?