Self-interest and Collective Management

Abstract

Arguments for privatizing public lands that appeal to the virtues of markets don’t look very good under close inspection. The free market may, in some sense, maximize the satisfaction of desires. The property rights which define it may, to some degree, institutionalize respect for persons. But such justifications are quite incomplete, for they do not explain how we are to encourage respect for humanity in one’s own person or the formation of desires worth satisfying. Before enlarging the market by privatizing public lands, we should ask whether we wouldn’t thereby eliminate institutions that help do this. I have suggested that this is indeed the case. It doesn’t quite follow that privatization is a bad idea, for under scrutiny the federal land-management system may not look very good either. The extravagant claims privatization advocates make for markets create unrealistic expectations, but privatization might still improve on what we now have, if that system were as fundamentally flawed as critics like Stroup and Baden allege. In that case, the good I see in it might be outweighed, and we’d have to look for other ways to achieve that good. So in this chapter I consider attacks on the current regime, attacks which appeal to problems that are supposedly inherent in the collective management of resources and are therefore remediable only by privatization. A good deal of it concerns the claim, made by premise 1 of the argument from productivity, that individuals are self-interested. Like the philosophical thesis of determinism, 2 this one challenges us to give a reading that is both true and non-trivial. As detailed in Chapter 3, privatization advocates argue that, while self-interest rules everyone’s behavior, the current system doesn’t constrain it in a socially productive way, for it allows people, particularly those with a role in shaping public land policies, to gain by shifting costs to others. After reviewing this argument in the first section, I suggest in the second section that, if self-interest were really as advocates of privatization conceive it to be, privatization would be a hopeless cause and an ineffective remedy to these problems.