Left wingers complain the market is flawed and government the answer. Right wingers complain government is flawed and everything can be sorted out by the market. They're both wrong. Peter Barnes says:
They’re both right that market and state are flawed, and both wrong that either market or state can save us. But if that’s the case, what are we to do? Is there, perhaps, a third set of institutions that can help?
I began pondering this dilemma about ten years ago, when I joined the board of Redefining Progress, a San Francisco think tank that aspires to break out of the boxes of liberal and conservative orthodoxy. My initial area of focus was climate change caused by human emissions of heat-trapping gases. Some analysts saw this as a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ I saw it as a tragedy first of the market, which has no way of curbing its own excesses, and second of government, which fails to protect the atmosphere because polluting corporations are powerful and future generations don’t vote. This way of viewing the problem led to a hypothesis: if the commons is a victim of market and government failure, rather than a cause, the remedy might be to strengthen the commons rather than to blame it (and then enclose it).
But how might that be done? According to prevailing wisdom, commons are inherently difficult to manage because no one has an ownership role. If Waste Management Inc. owned the atmosphere, it would charge dumpers a tipping fee, just as it does with its terrestrial landfills; the amount of the fee would reflect both the demand for dumping and the remaining supply of storage space. But since no one (at the moment) has title to the atmosphere, dumping proceeds without cost or limit.
‘Who owns the sky?’ became a kind of Zen koan for me — a seemingly innocent query that, upon reflection, opens many unexpected doors. I wondered what would happen if title to the atmosphere were held by a trust whose beneficiaries were all citizens equally. Such a trust would do exactly what Waste Management Inc., if it owned the sky, would do: charge dumpers for filling its dwindling storage space. Pollution would cost more and there’d be steadily less of it. All this would happen without government intervention (other than assigning property rights to the trust). And there’d be a wonderful bonus: every American would get a dividend check! This model became known as the ‘sky trust’ and has made some political headway.
In time, I realized this model could be extended to multiple, if not all, forms of pollution, and to much else as well. Waste sinks like air, water and soil are shared inheritances that have limited absorption capacities. They (along with other depletable gifts of nature) can and should be placed in trust for future generations — not just figuratively, but literally. The trusts would have two fiduciary responsibilities: first, to preserve their assets for future generations, and second, to use revenue (e.g., from dumping fees) for the benefit of living citizens more or less equally.
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