Garret Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons and Plato and Marx Philosophy of Communal Property

Garrett Hardin developed the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons. The basic concept is a giant pasture that is for everyone to have a piece of land and for the herdsman to have as many cattle a possible to sustain the land. This land should be able to maintain itself for quite a long time because of cattle dying as well as the population staying relatively stable. But at some point the population will begin growing and the herdsman will want to maximize their profits by having more cattle, which in return the land cannot sustain. The herdsman receives all the profit from adding one more animal to the pasture so the herdsman will eventually begin adding more cattle, but the overgrazing caused by that added animal will destroy the land making it uninhabitable for everyone. Thus you have the tragedy of the commons. For all the herdsman on the common, it is the only rational decision to make, adding another animal. This is the tragedy. Each man is compelled to add an infinite number of cattle to increase his profits, but in a world with limited resources it is impossible to continually grow. When resources are held "in common" with many people having access and ownership to it, then a rational person will increase their exploitation of it because the individual is receiving all the benefit, while everyone is sharing the costs.

Communism is a system of political and economic organization in which property is owned by the community and all citizens share in the enjoyment of the common wealth, more or less according to their need. Marx believed that property is based on wage labor and capital labor. In the Communist Manifesto, he suggested a course of action for a proletariat revolution to overthrow capitalism and, eventually, br...

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...s man has caused, but when all is said and done the world will go on, but the humankind inhabiting it may not. We will die off long before nature does. I also believe that Hardin looked at the adding of more cattle to the field as being unavoidable in human nature to want to profit more at other's expenses. I do not see this to be true. Uneducated people maybe, but as people began to be educated they would no longer do it. We have implemented many different pollution clean up plans in the United States and it continues to be a big issue that people take seriously. I also believe that people are able to find other resources once one is depleted through either developping replacements for those resources or using renewable resources and in the end it balances out. The only way to really prevent people from taking more than their share is to remove the incentive to.