We’re what? Running out of mackerel you say?

We’d just like to congratulate the collective governments of Europe on this achievement:

The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) warned last year that mackerel stocks were at breaking point owing to overfishing. Its Good Fish Guide, which ranks choices using a traffic-light system, rates north-east Atlantic mackerel “red”, making it a “fish to avoid”.

Mackerel? A fish so commonplace that even George Monbiot used to think that it was fine to hunt and eat?

If we could just remind politics and governments have been in charge of who may fish for what and where for three quarters of a century now. Fishing was in that first Treaty of Rome after all. So, well done there, vry well done those men.

We agree, entirely, that fishing is indeed a problem. It’s a classic example of Garrett Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. A form of management of access - given the size of demand - is indeed required. To which there are those two possible solutions (no, Elinor Ostrom’s one only works on small communities where social pressure is sufficiently strong). We can privatise the resource and leave it to the self-interest of the owners to preserve it or we can hand it off to the bureaucratic classes to manage it for us. Those are the choices and, yes, a choice does have to be made.

So, we’ve tried that bureaucracy one for that three quarters (OK, maybe two thirds) of a century and we’re running out of the cheap, trash, fish now. The good stuff, the cod, haddock and hake is largely gone already. So, let’s not use government to manage our scarce resources then, eh? On the very basic grounds that doing so does not, in fact, work.

Think on it. Land you’re allowed to build upon has been a nationalised - at least, bureaucratically managed - resource since 1947 and it’s near impossible to find a plot in this blessed realm. And just think what energy prices would be like if politics had ever been able to get its teeth into who may go fracking and where? Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?

In theory - as Hardin points out - that governmental regulation could work. In practice it doesn’t. Which leaves us with only the one solution to what is indeed a real problem.

Privatise everything.

Tim Worstall