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Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

This looks very interesting from a regulation point of view, as a potential way to bring greedy self-interest into alignment with national/international social interest. I wonder what scenarios could be given a "pest tax", to alter the dynamic from a tradgedy of the commons to a cooperative/competitive optimum?

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The classical solution to the tragedy of the commons for rivalrous goods is propertization. It's the logic behind contemporary land rights, some very successful commercial fisheries management (north west Atlantic), and emissions auctions in the US (SOx and NOx implementation - but notably not the proposed carbon, which has other wierd factors bolted on)

That's terribly limited though, since it basically relies on a land grab, and people who come along later are out of luck.

How does that apply to rolling auctions?

That's why you introduce a land value tax. As the supply of interested parties increases, so too does the demand and therefore the value of the land. This has several effects:

1) incentivizes unproductive land owners to sell

2) incentivizes productive land owners to seek tenants

3) generates public revenues to offset negative externalities

Yes but the rentier class (our overlords) don’t like LVT.

That never seems to get mentioned at the time the commons are privatized, only in salons later on. Also, it's rather hard to build capital improvements on fisheries, and correspondingly this does nothing for the preservation of wilderness. which is a problem that privatization is supposed to solve but frequently doesn't.

There's plenty of science against (20th century) top heavy / top down control. The issue seems to be: the current power holders admitting their model is flawed; and those being managed realized they'd be better off without "leadership."

> top heavy / top down control

Could you characterise what is meant by this?

I know that achieving some objective 'X' may not be amenable to regulation which says 'you must do X'; but regulation may (in some circumstances, with sufficient thought) alter the situation's dynamics such that greedy self-interest in that environment just-so-happens to coincide with causing 'X'.

What better alternatives are there to "top down control"; do you mean a "vote with your wallet" sort of 'bottom up' pressure?

Centralized, as opposed to decentralized. I would say these farms/farmers are decentralized. There's no gov agency, with some academia pencil pusher in some removed city overseaing them. They've figured it out. And they will continue to do so.

p.s. Team of Teams (book) does a great job flying to decentralized flag.

Not quite. There's plenty of examples in nature of automatons executing simple behaviors without an overseer that lead to tremendous complexity and efficiency.

However, we only see the successful emergent phenomenon, not the failed ones. Also, to this day we can not make accurate predictions of inherently chaotic systems.

So, while a bottom up sysytem may optimize, exactly whatt it optimizes is impossible to discern.

Well. Yes. But I didn't say always. Only that it is (often?) very possible to find solutions in a local decentralized sort of way.

I believe ecology has to be turned into a strong economic factor if we want anything to happen in its favor. Assuming political cooperation, the easiest way I see is to just slap a tax on any and all polluting emissions. That's very much top-down and seems very useful.

Private property and profit motive are obstacles.

Not really; they're exactly what I meant by "greedy self-interest".

If you don't support neoliberal fantasies, your comments probably aren't welcome here.

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