For example, we are running out of fish in the ocean from overfishing. But there's no shortage of cows and chickens, despite massive consumption of them. The former is the commons, the latter is private property.
Much like how there isn't any reason you have to pay for food in principle. It could become so cheap and easy to produce, say, bread or cheese that it is available everywhere at no nominal cost.
So yes, you should. You already do, realistically.
There'd be specialist companies that do bulk oxygen supplies too, a quick search found things like https://www.dswgascylinder.com/product/liquid-oxygen-trailer.... Not a market I'm familiar with.
I suppose I'll just add in postscript; your not going to get much out of the conversation if you don't take it seriously. There are people who make great money selling oxygen. It isn't automatically priced at $0. In some hypothetical world where quality oxygen wasn't just floating around in the atmosphere, people would pay for it in the same way they pay for other essentials like food or water. Paying for water is about as crazy as paying for oxygen, they both basically just turn up out of the atmosphere. And there is precedent for a commons essential good becoming more expensive, food used to be something people just picked up off the ground for free. Or hunted down on unclaimed land.
If that were to change, which it may, you would feel differently.
It's a fact that, right now, the dude can use whatever amount of air he feels is appropriate for his circumstances. Even if I wanted to interfere I doubt I'm even on the same continent as he is, and it isn't my business anyway.
Slightly more formally, an assertion of exclusive property rights is a sufficient condition for something to be closed access, but it isn't necessary.
Though, admittedly, that does depend on what one's definition of a free market is. Is it unfettered commerce, consumer protections and suchlike be damned? Is it a system of commerce that ensures equitable access? I'm personally of the mind that, as long as I trade with certificates that bear Caesar's face (or trade with proxies for such certificates, like a MasterCard), he gets to make the rules in exchange for my being able to lean on his legal system to protect my interests, so I find that the equitable access angle is nice.
(Likewise, trading with Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever the in-vogue cryptocurrency is today means that the code makes the rules, and I get to pay for the privilege of having my transactions indelibly entered into the distributed ledger and for the code governing those transactions to be buggy and exploitable. I'm still scratching my head at it.)
At the risk of building a strawman here, I'll caution that it's logically inconsistent to expect the state to enforce exclusive rights while also urging that strict regulation of a shared commons is an illegitimate market intervention.
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0: That is, unless the title holder grants license, but that's a whole other conversation.
It is a minor point I suppose, but this is the other way round. Because Caesar makes the rules you trade certificates that bear his face. It takes vigour and energy on the part of law enforcement to stop people from moving to private currencies.
Sigh. No need to make up one's own definition. Googling "free market":
"A free market is an economic system where prices, wages, and the flow of goods are determined by supply and demand. There is no government control or central planning telling people what to buy, sell, or make. Instead, private choices and voluntary trades drive the economy."
Henry George in his Progress and Poverty makes similar gestures toward defining a free market this way.
Part of the reason why it's important to consider other definitions (and other economic models) is that there is an important result in economics from the 1970's that, more or less, establishes the lack of a guarantee that the demand curve in an aggregate demand model (a macroeconomic model) will slope downward. This makes the aggregate demand model less than useful for a priori arguments about supply and demand in the macro context; they must instead be approached a posteriori.
It's also the big reason why I'm uninterested in a colloquial definition that is heavily filtered through von Mises and Friedman.
The government tries to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand all the time. Unsuccessfully. A while ago, a good friend of mine asked me what would happen to jobs if the minimum wage was raised. I said the number of jobs would go down. He said "aha! here's a study that proved that the jobs increased!" I said I don't need to read it, because the researchers goofed.
Some years later, the study was retracted because it was flawed.
It was like a story on HackerNews some years back that made a claim that electric cars were 90% efficient. I knew that was hokum right off the bat. But I still had people with PhD's in engineering saying it was true.
The car loses 10% just in losses in the battery, let alone anything else.
So I did some research on the author. Seems it was a person without a degree in physics or engineering who worked at a ski resort.
I'm curious. When does it not apply?
Other people have a demand to dump garbage in the ocean because it's cheaper than disposing of their trash properly.
How does the free market solve this? Will someone be buying the ocean any time soon?
The supply and demand model only applies to analysis of microeconomic systems with perfect competition, namely of systems that lack monopoly and monopsony; that have perfect information; that lack an ability of a single economic actor to affect the price in the market; that lack externalities[0]; that lack transaction costs; that lack unknowable probability distributions of outcomes; that lack economic actors that change their behaviors based on what they expect other actors to do; and that lack non-market rules or structures that restrict prices, quantities, or entry. These assumptions are all-or-nothing, and there are a lot of them. It's also an equilibrium model, and we aren't guaranteed to have equilibrium.
For macroeconomic analysis (i.e., analysis of multiple sectors of an economy or multiple economies), it's problematic because of a theorem from the 1970's due to Sonnenschein, Mantel, and Debreu. I've stated it elsewhere, but it also has the implication that the behaviors of the actors in a microeconomic system do not carry over to the macroeconomic context. This tends to violate many of the assumptions above. (Though, if it isn't obvious how or why, please ask.) Furthermore, in the macro context, I don't think we'll ever have equilibrium; at least, I'm having a hard time thinking of an example when it exists.
Let's bring in a physics analogy. While we can look at mechanics through the lens of elementary algebra, those tools really only give us the ability to look at static force-balance problems for springs and pulleys in equilibrium. To model such a system more closely to how it behaves in the universe, with damping, inertia, and feedback (and whatever other time-dependent behaviors I may be forgetting), we are best served moving to differential equations.
Economics is no different; the supply and demand model is a lot like Hooke's law in its simplicity and its applicability. (In fact, in my modeling, I very heavily used numerical solutions of PDEs.)
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0: When the retail price of kerosene tanked by 70% between 1860 and 1880, this resulted in millions more kerosene lamps and lamps broadly being lit for longer periods of time. This had externalities in the form of more soot and particulate matter (and probably also respiratory illness, but I couldn't seem to find anything with observations from the time period).
I'm going to stop right there. Perfect competition is unnecessary. Part of perfect competition is perfect information.
No transactions have perfect information. There is always "risk" involved. And risk contributes to determining the price of something. Ever wonder why used cars lose a third of their value when you drive a new one off the lot? It's because of the risk that a person might be selling that almost-new car with a hidden expensive fault in it.
Also, risky investments come with higher returns. Safer investments come with lower returns. The lack of perfect information gets a dollar value for the amount of imperfection.
Risk is absolutely part of the free market, and absolutely a part of the Law of Supply and Demand.
Um, OK.
> Perfect competition is unnecessary.
It is definitionally a precondition to applying the supply and demand model for analysis.
> Part of perfect competition is perfect information.
This is mostly correct. It's actually a biconditional: perfect competition iff perfect information.
> No transactions have perfect information.
This is correct.
> There is always "risk" involved. And risk contributes to determining the price of something.
Risk (due to Frank Knight, sometimes called Knightian risk) is a term of art that refers to known probability distributions of market outcomes. My professional training is literally to build pricing models against these.
> Ever wonder why used cars lose a third of their value when you drive a new one off the lot? It's because of the risk that a person might be selling that almost-new car with a hidden expensive fault in it.
No, I can't say I've ever wondered this; I've not been around a lot of new cars. (See also: the whole Mennonite thing.) I know that it's because of the term of art that we call uncertainty (again, due to Frank Knight, sometimes called Knightian uncertainty), which refers to those unknown probability distributions of outcomes that I listed as a precondition to applying this model for analysis. I can't price against those.
A used car market is what we call an Akerlof market, which is a market with a feedback system that has a whole lot of pathologies linked to information asymmetry. This also happens to be the textbook example of adverse selection, which is itself an example of how the supply and demand model fails to predict the market due to that information asymmetry.
> Risk is … absolutely a part …
This is correct with the words written here, but I'll caution that risk as a term of art has been misused.