From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Like Lloyd and Thomas Malthus before him, Hardin was primarily interested in   
   the problem of human population growth. But in his essay, he also focused on   
   the use of larger (though finite) resources such as the Earth's atmosphere and   
   oceans, as well as    
   pointing out the "negative commons" of pollution (i.e., instead of dealing   
   with the deliberate privatization of a positive resource, a "negative commons"   
   deals with the deliberate commonization of a negative cost, pollution).   
      
   As a metaphor, the tragedy of the commons should not be taken too literally.   
   The "tragedy" is not in the word's conventional or theatric sense, nor a   
   condemnation of the processes that lead to it. Similarly, Hardin's use of   
   "commons" has frequently been    
   misunderstood, leading him to later remark that he should have titled his work   
   "The Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons".   
      
   The metaphor illustrates the argument that free access and unrestricted demand   
   for a finite resource ultimately reduces the resource through ov   
   r-exploitation, temporarily or permanently. This occurs because the benefits   
   of exploitation accrue to    
   individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the   
   resource to the point in which they become reliant on it, while the costs of   
   the exploitation are borne by all those to whom the resource is available   
   (which may be a wider class of    
   individuals than those who are exploiting it). This, in turn, causes demand   
   for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball until the   
   resource collapses (even if it retains a capacity to recover). The rate at   
   which depletion of the    
   resource is realized depends primarily on three factors: the number of users   
   wanting to consume the common in question, the consumptive nature of their   
   uses, and the relative robustness of the common.   
      
   The same concept is sometimes called the "tragedy of the fishers", because   
   fishing too many fish before or during breeding could cause stocks to plummet.   
      
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons   
   --   
   --   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)