I've seen elephants in Kenya

Way way way too simplistic. Take a look at Richard Mabey's book 'Nature Cure' to see a subtle and empirically-based discussion of commons-based ownership (which clearly has very little in common with state-ownership). The assumption that commonly-held assets must always be exploited / expropriated / degraded as individuals compete for resources is wrong. Humankind, thank God, is more complicated than that.

The introduction of the Communal Areas Management Program for Indegenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) in Zimbabwe saw people in the communal areas developing a positive attitude towards elephants and other animals since the local communities were seen as partners in conservation and not a threat to wildlife. Under CAMPFIRE the Zimbabwean government has given management rights to the local communities. Contrary to what you say, the colonial government under the late Ian Smith declared animal wildlife state
property. Any person (Black) who was found hunting was labeled a poacher and consequently, was prosecuted. The application of the law was selective since white commercial farmers were allowed to own animals on "their land." Mugabe's government has realized that conservation does not only involve telling people not to poach, but also permitting them to use animal wildlife in a sustainable way. In my paper on environmental justice in Zimbabwe, I argue for the need for the Zimbabwean government to get out of the organizations created by the colonial land policy, to create sound post-colonial institutions and to identify just and wise post-colonial policies.

CAMPFIRE has proved that communal ownership of resources can promote conservation, however, what is important is for people to have a positive attitude towards the resources. They can only do that if they are benefiting from them. In other words, it's not always the case that when things are owned collectively greed thrives.
Elephants have not been wiped out in Kenya.

From my own experience with chinese who lived in communist china, particularly the hard years(my sister's father-in-law being a classic example), this is very true. They are a bigoted, selfish, egotistic, and imbecilic people who need to grow up urgently and have some real consideration for others.

Thankfully, the generations of chinese born since the 1980s are a lot more reasonable, and often much kinder and helpful. Not a coincidence.

Some of the commenters here are totally missing the point.

Patrick, its not about communal ownership. Here in Australia, we have forced lots of that stuff onto our aboriginal communities who are still the most impoverished on the continent.

Free markets, property rights equal environmental preservation, sustainable and most efficient use of resources, and the best way to adapt to changing environments.

Isn't it possible that the increase in wildlife has more to do with the collapse of the economy and the expropriation of farmland? Perry once told me about how the wild boar population exploded in Croatia during the war period...

Given that Rhodesians are leaving the country (flooding across the border into South Africa) and farms are going to seed, might this not be a better explanation?

Perfect!
Now let's adapt the premise to welfare cash, public dole, WIC, hiring quotas, "affordable and subsidized" public housing, mandatory
"insurance", and free public education.

With a bit of work, eminent domain for "the public good", will nestle right in for a cozy snuggle.

I suppose it boils down to what extremes will be executed
to collect user fees, no matter how they're labeled.

Isn't it possible that the increase in wildlife has more to do with the collapse of the economy and the expropriation of farmland? Perry once told me about how the wild boar population exploded in Croatia during the war period...

Maybe it's both.

The animals that make good postcards are also widely regarded by farmers as pests. Elephants, for instance, either eat or trample entire fields, which makes farming an exercise in frustration. Perhaps hippos as well, but that's one I'll have to defer to someone else.

The guy who can charge a few thousand bucks as a concession to the elephant hunter has an incentive to overlook losing a few dozen acres of barley or whatever. Whatever grain he didn't harvest, he can buy with the trespass fee. On the other hand, if the animal in question is 'protected,' then there's no way to offer legal hunting and so the thing will destroy crops until it's killed illegally.

Not only that, the guy who can profit from a legal hunting concession on his own land has his own incentive to prevent poaching. If the landowner or tenant farmer can't legally profit from Kenny the Kudu's presence, then he benefits instead from Kenny's absence. One rumor that Kenny's horns cause sexual arousal, and Kenny (and Kerry and Kevin and Katie) are dead. And so are all of the springbok and everything else that a poacher might somehow think is a kudu.

I've seen similar things here, actually. Ranchers hate elk. After all, the elk eat the same grass as the four-legged locusts that USDA subsidizes. That is, ranchers hated elk until they realized that elk hunters will pay landowners for access. (Or would even pay holders of BLM grazing leases, despite the fact that BLM land is supposedly open to the public anyway)

Just look at Indian (or Native American) Reservations for more examples. If the inhabitants split up the land and could see for higher use they would all be better off. Hard to imagine them being worse off.

Land ownership is another good example, including here in the US. Vast tracts are owned by the federal government, yet they so often prove to be poor stewards of the property. Private ownership is an incentive to care for and/or improve the land, as it is with the Zimbabwean elephants

Land ownership is another good example, including here in the US. Vast tracts are owned by the federal government, yet they so often prove to be poor stewards of the property. Private ownership is an incentive to care for and/or improve the land, as it is with the Zimbabwean elephants

The free-market is based on the voluntary sharing of resources. Collectivism is based on forcing people to "share" under threat of violence. Therefor it should come as no surprise that more selfish a person is the more they gravitate towards collectivism or that collectivism fosters destructive selfishness.

The free-market conditions people to pay attention to wants and needs of others so that they can trade. Collectivism conditions people to to view others as mere opportunities to loot. Collectivist have no need to understand the wants of others because they can simply take what they want.

The free-market suppresses greed because people have to give to get. A person's desires become linked to their productivity. If he wants more, he must produce more. Collectivism fosters greed by severing the connection between desire and effort. People can get all they desire by taking it from others by force. They have no incentive to restrain themselves.

It is no accident that the free-market and a broad respect for the rights and welfare of others are intricately linked in history.

Communal ownership is not the problem, irresponsible ownership is, as is lack of ownership. Everything owned by corporations is in some sense "communally owned", as there isn't (usually) one person who "owns" those assets.

So long as whatever communal ownership arrangement has a mechanism to actually make decisions, and to receive and share out the benefits of ownership, communal ownership can be good stewardship. When the commune can't make decisions, or when they have the obligations but not the benefits of ownership, trouble starts.

It is no accident that the free-market and a broad respect for the rights and welfare of others are intricately linked in history.

It is no accident that such society is based on the principle that every individual is morally sovereign and is free to pursue his own, freely chosen goals and values -- which is to say, to be selfish. Only when men are thusly made morally free of one another, are they able to discover and realize the inestimable value there is in dealing with one another on these terms.

Conversely, in a society that trumpets the opposite notion -- that of unchosen duty to others, i.e. altruism -- every other person becomes a threat to you. Each human being you encounter carries a moral blank check to be drawn on your life, an open mouth, ready to consume the hours and days of your life.

So what's a person who wants to live, to do under these circumstances?

In the first scenario, under the moral terms of egoism, he seeks out others whose resources and abilities fit well with his own, to divide their labor.

In the second, he learns to hate his fellow man, and learns that unless he is able to break free, his means of survival is to become an open mouth -- or a wolf that preys on such.

The obvious conclusion to draw from that is that self-interested behavior is morally right and good, and the altruistic notion of "duty" pernicious -- but no, people continue to insist without rational justification that it is the *latter* which is selfish behavior.

It is not about any "commons" or communal ownership. It is about the moral terms upon which such "ownership" is based.

Is it shared ownership -- which belongs to the first scenario, where shares can freely be bought into or out of by sovereign individuals in a free market?

Or is it the contradictory and ultimately Marxist notion of "public property" where we all "own" it with no effort on our part -- *or choice to opt in or out* on our part?

Seerak,
Whilst I broadly agree with what you write, it's important to avoid a reductionist bastardisation of your argument. The 'commons ownership' is, properly, shared ownership, but ownership shared specifically as a result of the social experience which is the result of the 'effort on our own part'.

I'd argue that not only is it quite likely that that 'social experience' bought as a result of the shared experience of individual effort is not merely likely to produce what one might call 'good custodianship' of the assets concerned, but that in practice, it historically has done in certain circumstances.

Moreover, the contrary proposition has also been true: viz, that sometimes ownership systems in which shares are freely bought and sold by sovereign individuals can and has produced periods of 'bad custodianship' of the assets.

In the case of the commons, I'd like to think, like to believe, I suppose, that the key fact is that the system didn't start ab initio, but developed over time as - oh god, I can't avoid this phrase - an ecology of common ownership which embedded the rights/responsibilities within a specific shared history of the society concerned.

Not a claim, I think, that can be made for 'nationalisations' which usually have as their ecological background a swamp of Marxists economic, historic and social error and grievance. Nothing good is likely to come from an ecology like that!

I don't the the form of ownership matters in principle, so long as those in control of the disposition of the item concerned get to benefit from good decisions and suffer from bad decisions.

In theory, this can be worked communally just as it can be worked through several property.

The trouble with communal ownership is it requires a sense of community to begin with - you can't establish communal ownership ab initio (amongst a bunch of people who haven't actually been a community for a while already), because there's no social backdrop of habitual ways of dealing with free riders and such, so free riding can go on for quite some time before its effects are noticed and by then it's too late.

Whereas as soon as someone comes to own something in a system of several property, they are immediately faced with the consequences of their decisions, for good or bad.

I was a bit hippyish in my younger days, and I have to say my experience if communal sharing has not been good. It's basically a bit of a pie in the sky idea developed by middle class intellectuals, who take for granted the habit-framework of middle class life. It hardly ever works in practice (unless, as I said, the community is already well established, and it's a matter of it coming into communal possession of something new).

And it certainly wouldn't work (for instance) in a community that was nothing more than a bunch of poor people lumped together according to the abstract category "poor".

Even with a "sense of community" communal ownership is a disaster.

For example, the Russians (and this will come as a shock to some people) were once known to have the strongest sense of community in Europe - yet the communal land ownership of the Mirs produced famine. After Stolypin became chief minister (after the 1905 mess) he allowed individual peasants in the Mirs to own land - and even in the brief years that Russia had before the First World War the results were remarkable. If only there had been more time.

The great demand of the Mexican revolutionaries was communal land ownership by the village communities - and they told the truth when they said village ownership would not be the same as state ownership.

However, it still undermined Mexican economic development. Both by confining a large part of Mexican farming to subsistance, and by denying profits from farming to the development of industry and commerce.

It is often forgotten that it was profits from domestic farming (not slavery or "Imperialist plunder") that financed most of the British industrial revolution.

Without the agricultural revolution there would have been no industrial revolution.

And there can be no such transformation of farming under village ownership.