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Monday, October 19, 2009
I’ve Long Maintained That The Tragedy
OF THE COMMONS is a tragedy of the commons—fundamental, systemic, intrinsic to the very notion that goods can be held in common. My aphorism for this occasion is, “What is owned by all is owned by none.” That is: what anyone and everyone has a claim of ownership on, nobody will own up to the responsibility for. It seems self-evident to me, and history bears me out—from ancient times to the Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the utter failures of the 20th Century Marxist socialist states. Goods held in common degrade. Goods held by individuals with exclusive ownership rights, at least have inherent to them the possibility of increase, given prudent management.
Which brings me to an interesting tangent: “Non-profit” is a dirty word. If an enterprise does not both repay its capital investment and increase in value, it is a waste. Its operation amounts to pissing money down a rathole. And, as all good liberty-loving Americans know, money represents people’s lives. It’s called a medium exchange for this reason: one exchanges bits of a person’s life for goods and services through the medium of money. Wasting money wastes lives. It must be seen as a cardinal sin in a free society. I would urge those who love liberty but seek outlet for their altruistic impulses to eschew non-profit or not-for-profit enterprises, and instead invest in economic activity which at least hopes to provide a profit. I submit you do more for your community thereby in the long run.
Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.
Comments
Hmmm. My wife and I send our children to a parent co-op not-for-profit preschool. I serve on the board as the Treasurer. I am a volunteer, and so is everybody else other than the teachers. We pay our teachers using tuition, and use any left over plus fundraising to pay for field trips, school supplies and improvements, internet access, etc. Any excess is carried forward to the subsequent year in case of hard times (like this year). No remunerations other than teacher salaries are paid, ever.
“Pissing money down a rathole”? Nonsense. Our children are receiving wonderful benefit at a surprisingly low cost to the parents. A “waste”? Rubbish.
Now, arguably, one could say that our attempts to stay in the black are effectively a drive to seek profit—a profit of $0. But that’s a pretty fine parsing of the word.
And what about churches? Again, most of those certainly do try to stay out of debt, but anything above that is given to various charities and other good works. Not the same thing at all as a for-profit business (not that there’s anything wrong with for-profit businesses, mind you).
Mr. Alger, I think you may have painted with overly broad strokes on this post.
Posted by on 10/20/2009 at 01:07 AMAlex;
I submit to you the parable of the talents.
‘Nuff said.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 10/20/2009 at 09:16 AMThe commons always gets trashed. A private school to which you have to pay tuition to get into is not a commons. It is jointly-owned private property to which all users have promised to do their part to maintain simply by signing up.
A national forest with no restrictions IS a commons, and what happens there?
I could show you pictures if you’d like, but I would guess you can all remember from memory the pictures of forest lands cut down to bare soil by logging companies competing to see who could get more logs off of the land than the next guy before they all ran out. (Prior to regulation, of course)
I’m also sure you’ve all seen this picture at some point in time or another. The dump site. Somewhere on public land, where people have decided to dump their stuff. It piles up like landfill, until access is removed or the area gets patrolled.
If the typical person gets all the beenfits of owning some piece of property, but none of the responsibilities therein, the property will get trashed.
Think with horror upon the idea of a “neighborhood car” or a “public boat” and imagine how long either would last in your typical neighborhood or at your local lake.
Weeks? Days? Hours?
My money is on hours. How about you?
Posted by on 10/20/2009 at 07:30 PMMark (if you will permit me the liberty), I reviewed that parable to ensure I remembered it correctly. Since you chose not to explain why you think it is relevant ("‘Nuff said” is all I’ve got work with), I will do my best to see if I can deduce your point. Please correct me if I get it wrong.
As I understand it, the point of that parable is that we must not just sit on what we have been given in order to avoid losing it, but to take chances to make it grow. Fair enough; if our preschool were able to raise enough money that we could afford really nice equipment and school supplies, or pay our teachers a larger salary, or perhaps even acquire a bigger building, that would be super.
Unfortunately the parable does not have one servant who loses his talents, so we are not given any clear insight into how that lord would have treated such an unfortunate servant. But the third servant does give us a clue: he says that he knows his master is a “hard man”. We can therefore safely speculate that a servant that lost his money would not get off lightly. Similarly, if our little co-op were to lose our money through unwise actions or just plain unlucky circumstances, we would be cast into the outer darkness where we would have to weep and gnash our teeth.
So it seems to me that we must strike a balance between prudence and boldness. The way we run things we favor the former. Your position advocates for the latter, which is not necessarily wrong. But you go further than that, too far in my opinion: you state that not having a profit motive is wrong in the economic sense, because it wastes money and therefore lives(!). And I also get the sense that you feel it is wrong morally somehow, although you never explicitly state that.
I contend that this is nonsense on stilts. Not having profit as a primary motivator in no way invalidates the good that comes of our enterprise, and I defy you to demonstrate otherwise. Furthermore, participation in our co-op preschool is strictly voluntary; nobody is forced to join who does not wish to, and we in no way benefit from the public purse (i.e. we are tax payers, not tax receivers).
Perhaps you might say that having a profit motive would improve the quality of our offerings. But I would counter with the fact that we are all volunteers, and we do this because we think it is beneficial to our children, not because we will receive an income. In our situation, being paid might actually degrade our dedication by splitting our focus.
Now I should mention the fact that I am an ardent capitalist, and believe that free markets have been and are still the greatest engine of wealth generation for all people evah. Nothing ever invented has raised more ordinary people out of poverty than capitalism; nothing else has even come close. But it is not a panacea! There are cases where people may choose to arrange their affairs differently, because they feel that there is a better way to achieve their goals. And they may be right.
Posted by on 10/21/2009 at 01:25 AMAlex;
WHY is your school structured as a non-profit co-op. Why is it NOT a for-profit enterprise?
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 10/21/2009 at 09:33 AMMark, the quick and easy answer is “it was that way when I got here, and that’s how our constitution states we operate”. That alone is probably not a satisfying reason to you (nor to me, actually), but I have already touched on some reasons why we do not have profit as our primary focus in my earlier comments.
What I would love to get from you would be a more detailed explanation of why you believe being profit focused would be better for us, or at least why not being profit focused is bad in our case. So far you have made a sweeping statement with which I disagreed, and I have cited some arguments as to why I believe you are over-generalizing. But up to now you have not addressed my arguments, choosing instead to limit yourself to one-liners. This is of course your privilege, but it doesn’t make me inclined to spend much more time continuing this rather one-sided debate.
Posted by on 10/22/2009 at 01:41 AMNo prob. Between you and Og over at BTB, I’m feeling challenged enough to want to explain. I just need to clear a little elbow room in my RL to do the writing.
But the short version: my plaint is not—or not meant to be—an indictment of charities (though I would urge caution in the choices of charitable action) per se so much as it is of the notion that good works must be done without a profit motive in order to be seen as good. And, in particular, of the perverted tax code which requires a zero balance to maintain permitted status.
I beg your patience.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 10/22/2009 at 09:57 AMI look forward to it!
Posted by on 10/22/2009 at 09:32 PM
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