Fanfare for the Commons

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The source of this invisibility is no mystery considering the forces that dominate the media and politics. Advertisers and the interests served by campaign contributors make their money by exploiting the commons, not by nurturing it. A culture that recognizes only the part of life transacted through money devalues anything that does not involve buying and selling.

The answer to reclaiming the commons is not automatic recourse to a larger public sector; the cause is not served by an enlargement of the bureaucratic state. The state can destroy the commons as effectively as the market can, as the experience of former communist countries demonstrated. Environmental destruction was as bad there as under capitalism and, as Czech playwright Václav Havel has eloquently explained, the social commons withered as the state tried to occupy every inch of social space.

By the same token, market arrangements, conducted on the right scale, actually can enhance the commons. The neighborhood coffee shop and stores on a traditional Main Street are crucial to the fabric of community, for example. We need to recognize that the commons is distinct from both government and market, and requires a legal framework of its own.

We need new ground rules to protect our common property, just as there are rules to protect our individual or private property. This is a crucial point. A market is not an act of nature; it does not arise spontaneously nor was it divinely ordained. Societies create markets and societies sustain them. Take away the legal and institutional structure created by government—the money system, the banking and securities laws, the protection of copyrights and patents, the defense of foreign oil production, and so on—and the modern market economy could not exist.

If the market requires such an array of props, it is not surprising that the commons needs a few as well. The possibilities are without end. The important social functions of traditional business districts can be defended by taking away the subsidies for sprawl development in the tax laws, the highway program, and antiquated zoning laws. We can set aside more space on public airwaves for community, as opposed to corporate, use so that radio and television serve less as media for electronic huckstering and more as a village tree.

Steps like these would not mean government intrusion into more economic and social space. To the contrary, they would make it possible for something besides corporations to occupy this space. To put this another way, the so-called 'tragedy of the commons'—that a commons is inevitably fated to be overused—is a myth. The commons simply requires the right protective arrangements—just like the market has.

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