The Free Market 4, no. 2 (February 1986)
It is a common myth that the near-disappearance of the whale and of various species of fish was caused by “capitalist greed,” which, in a short-sighted grab for profits, despoiled the natural resources—the geese that laid the golden eggs—from which those profits used to flow. Hence, the call for government to step in and either seize the ownership of these resources, or at least to regulate strictly their use and development.
It is private enterprise, however, not government, that we can rely on to take the long and not the short view. For example, if a private investor or business firm owns a natural resource, say a forest, it knows that every tree cut down and sold for short-run profits will have to be balanced by a decline in the capital value of the forest remaining. Every firm, then, must balance short-run returns as against the loss of capital assets. Therefore, private owners have every economic incentive to be far-sighted, to replant trees for every tree cut down, to increase the productivity and to maintain the resource, etc. It is precisely government—or firms allowed to rent but not own government-owned resources—whose every incentive is to be short-run. Since government bureaucrats control but do not own the resources “owned” by government, they have no incentive to maximize or even consider the long-run value of the resource. Their every incentive is to loot the resource as quickly as possible.
And so, it should not be surprising that every instance of “overuse” and destruction of a natural resource has been caused, not by private property and the free market, but by government intervention or crippling of such a market. In particular, either by government ownership or by government failure to protect private property rights in natural resources. Destruction of the grass cover in the West in the late 19th-century was caused by the federal government’s failure to recognize homesteading of land in large-enough technological units to be feasible. The 160-acre legal maximum for private homesteading imposed during the Civil War made sense for the wet agriculture of the East; but it made no sense in the dry area of the West, where no farm of less than one or two thousand acres was feasible. As a result, grassland and cattle ranches became land owned by the federal government but used by or leased to private firms. The private firms had no incentive to develop the land resource, since it could be invaded by other firms or revert to the government. In fact, their incentive was to use up the land resource quickly to destroy the grass cover, because they were prevented from owning it.
Water, rivers, parts of oceans, have been in far worse shape than land, since private individuals and firms have been almost universally prevented from owning parts of that water, from owning schools of fish, etc. In short, since homesteading private property rights has generally not been permitted in parts of the ocean, the oceans and other water resources have remained in a primitive state, much as land had been in the days before private property in land was permitted and recognized. Then, land was only in a hunting-and-gathering stage, where people were permitted to own and keep what they gathered or shot on the land, but were not permitted to own or transform the land itself. Only private ownership in the land itself can permit the emergence of agriculture—the transformation and cultivation of the land itself—bringing about an enormous growth in productivity and increase in everyone’s standard of living.
The world has accepted agriculture, and the marvelous fruits of such ownership and cultivation. It is high time to expand the dominion of man to one of the last frontiers on earth: aquaculture. Already, private property rights are be, ing developed in water and ocean resources, and we are just beginning to glimpse the wonders in store. More and more, in oceans and rivers, fish are being “farmed” instead of relying on random supply by nature. Whereas only three percent of all seafood produced in the United States in 1975 came from fish farms, this proportion tripled to twelve percent by 1984.
In Buhl, Idaho, the Clear Springs Trout Company, a fish farm, has become the single largest trout producer in the world, expanding its trout production from 10 million pounds per year in 1981 to 14 million pounds this year. Furthermore, Clear Springs is not content to follow nature blindly; as all farmers try to do, it improves on nature by breeding better and more productive trout. Thus, two years ago Clear Springs trout converted two pounds of food into one pound of edible flesh; now Clear Springs scientists have developed trout that will convert only 1.3 pounds of food into one pound of flesh. And Clear Springs researchers are in the process of developing that long-desired paradise for consumers: a boneless trout.
At this point, indeed, all rainbow trout sold commercially in the United States are produced in farms, as well as forty percent of the nation’s oysters, and ninety-five percent of commercial catfish.
Aquaculture, the wave of the future, is already here to stay, not only in fishery but also in such activities as off-shore oil drilling and the mining of manganese nodules on the ocean floor. ‘What aquaculture needs above all is the expansion of private property rights and ownership to all useful parts of the oceans and other water resources. Fortunately, the Reagan Administration rejected the Law of the Sea Treaty, which would have permanently subjected the world’s ocean resources to ownership and control by a world-government body under the aegis of the United Nations. With that threat over, it is high time to seize the opportunity to allow the expansion of private property in one of its last frontiers.
