Quotes About Commons

For however much the state may gain by not having to fund roads on its own, society would lose in aggregate if the open commons of transportation were lost.

The structure of a commons system makes selfish behavior much more convenient and profitable than behavior that is responsible to the whole community and to the future.

The tragedy of the commons arises from missing (or too long delayed) feedback from the resource to the growth of the users of that resource.

In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commons, studies what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest.

Resistance to digital industrialism may look like communism, but it's better understood as a simple reinstatement of the commons. Most

But what is "public property" if not an oxymoron?

What distinguishes a commons is that it is not private property, does not have a price, and is oriented towards 'use value' rather than 'exchange value.' It does not exist to generate profits.

Jim Sheridan, the MP who wants to ban sketchwriters from the Commons for being rude about politicians, is a blithering idiot. Sorry, scrub that - clearly a very thoughtful person with whom I might conceivably disagree on some marginal issues. A blithering savant, perhaps.

The law locks up both man and womanWho steals the goose from off the common,But lets the greater felon looseWho steals the common from the goose.

Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Libraries represent the sole contemporary American institution with the potential for making available a wide-ranging, genuinely diverse spectrum of opinions, cultural expressions, and ideas in an environment that is commercial-free and huckster-free, a commons where people can gather and select, in an un-intimidating atmosphere, whatever interests them, delights them, or even repels them--whatever they want to know about.

A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince.

Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood's forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

This contemporary version of the old struggle between "enclosure" and the "commons," between exploitation and commonality, pretty much sums up the stakes: not what new powers we can bring into the world, but what hard-won practices we can prevent from disappearing

at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.

Godwin and Shepard (1979) pointed out a decade ago that policy scientists were doing the equivalent of "Forcing Squares, Triangles and Ellipses into a Circular Paradigm" by using the commons-dilemma model without serious attention to whether or not the variables in the empirical world conformed to the theoretical model.

Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. (Hardin 1968, p. 1,244)

Since Garrett Hardin's challenging article in "Science" (1968), the expression "the tragedy of the commons" has come to symbolize the degradation of the environment to be expected whenever many individuals use a scarce resource in common.

Unfortunately, many analysts – in academia, special-interest groups, governments, and the press – still presume that common-pool problems are all dilemmas in which the participants themselves cannot avoid producing suboptimal results, and in some cases disastrous results.

Magna Carta only came into being in 1217, when the wording had been changed and parts of the original were extended in the Charter of the Forests. This complementary charter covered liberties granted to the common man, including rights to the commons, grazing, fishing, water, and firewood, and was perhaps the first ecological charter in history.

In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.

On 18 January, determined to repair fences, Churchill made a speech in the House of Commons to emphasize that 'the United States troops have done almost all the fighting and have suffered almost all the losses . . . Care must be taken in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British Army an undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever famous American victory.

For when people do not keep watch over the commons, it is destroyed. It results, then, that they fall into civil faction, compelling one another by force and not wishing to do what is just themselves.