Common Property

Common Property should be distinguished from both private and public state property, argues Peter Barnes, who proposes Trusts as a property format for it.

This distinction is often made by the geolibertarian branch of libertarianism.

Peer Property, such as the General Public License, may be considered to be a form of common property.

See the related concept of Collaborative Goods

Christian Siefkes proposes to reserve the term for the "permanent part of the commons — nobody has the right to take them out" [[1]]. He distinguishes it from Granted Property

Definition

A form of property to which individuals have open access (see Common Rights), and that has not been delegated to a community and/or its representatives.

Citation

Dan Sullivan:

"The distinction between common property and state property is lost on royal libertarians. Common property is that to which we all have inalienable rights. State property is that which the state actually owns, and can dispose of as it sees fit. For example, a public right of way is literally a right of way. Under principles of common law, nobody, not even the king, could close a traveled road and make it private property. A state maintenance truck, on the other hand, is state property, which can be sold if it no longer suits state purposes." (http://geolib.pair.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html)

Discussion

Peter Barnes on Common Property and Trusts

From Peter Barnes at http://onthecommons.org/node/995

"It seems that when it comes to "takings" of valuable property, governments in Europe as well as the United States have a double standard. If the property is privately owned, it can't be taken without fair compensation. In the U.S., this prohibition is embedded in the Constitution ("nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation," says the Fifth Amendment).

By contrast, if the valuable asset is commonly owned, no such prohibition exists. A government can take from the commons and give to private owners without the latter paying a dime. There doesn't even have to be a "public use" to justify the taking.

Why this double standard? Why does private property receive royal treatment, while Common Property gets the bum's rush?

Part of the answer is that private property is more clearly "possessed" than common property. It comes wrapped in deeds and titles that give it legitimacy and legal standing. Common property, by contrast, is generally ill-defined. There's no piece of paper that says who the atmosphere, or the broadcast spectrum, belong to. So when Bob Dole, the former Republican Senator, said in 1995 that the broadcast spectrum "belongs to every American equally," he had common sense, but no deed or title, to back him up. Hence Congress could blithely hand out free broadcast licenses to private media corporations, and no one could say it acted unconstitutionally.

It seems to me this is an oversight that can and should be corrected. A taking of valuable common property needs to be compensated just as much as a taking of private property. That compensation could go to government, or to a trust representing all beneficial owners. This would put an end to further windfalls for the rich, at the expense of everyone else. It would assure that common resources are used for the common good.

Perhaps, to make things crystal clear, we ought to create a new class of property -- common property -- that lies somewhere between private property and state property. Such property could be managed by trusts rather than corporations. Such trusts would be separate from government, and government couldn't take and redistribute their property without compensation, any more than it could take Exxon's. The trusts' beneficiaries would be future generations and all living citizens more or less equally. Trustees would be legally bound to serve those beneficiaries, just as corporate directors are legally bound to serve stockholders. Each citizen's beneficial share would be a non-transferable birthright.

One can imagine such trusts protecting common gifts such as the atmosphere, the broadcast spectrum and terrestrial ecosystems, paying equal dividends to living citizens, and supporting renewable energy, public transportation, non-commercial broadcasting and other common goods.

In short, by giving common property the same respect we give private property, we could have a market economy that takes better care of the planet and of citizens who lack private wealth. This would be a better version of capitalism than the one we have now." (http://onthecommons.org/node/995)

Josh Farley on using common property rights for non-rival goods

Josh Farley at http://onthecommons.org/node/1179

“Elinor Ostrom , Daniel Bromley , Fikret Berkes and others have pointed out that many societies have developed institutions based on common property rights that avoid the tragedy affecting rival, non-excludable resources, showing empirically that common ownership can be an effective solution. Is it possible that common property is the only efficient solution to the allocation of non-rival resources? Many existing environmental markets actually operate on this principle already. For example, it is the polity that determines allowable emission levels for SO2 and CO2 and the total allowable catch in fisheries using individually tradable quotas, not the market. The polity could not set supply if the resource were not common property. Shared production and shared ownership of information would also be more efficient than private ownership. Publicly funded research with results freely available to all would increase the economic surplus from information, and there is no plausible reason that salaried scientists would work harder for the private sector than the public sector or produce more socially valuable information.

In sum, private ownership of non-rival resources or resources that generate non-rival benefits seems to generate a tragedy of the non-commons, and the relative importance of non-rival resources seems to be increasing. Paradoxically, social ownership may be necessary for creating markets, as seems to be the case for waste absorption capacity. Perhaps the appropriateness of socialism and capitalism or of common property and private property should not be questions of ideology, but rather objectively determined by the physical nature of a resource as non-rival or rival. This certainly appears to be a worthwhile topic for ecological economists to investigate." (http://onthecommons.org/node/1179)

On the Difference between Common Pool Resources and Common Property Regimes

George Caffentzis in a presentation on the Neo-Hardinians scholars of the Commons:

"Scholars in the neo-Hardinian tendency have carried on many important empirical studies of common property systems across the planet as well as have made a number of important distinctions in the study of common property. This is not the place to assess their empirical studies (cf. the extensive bibliography on Private and Common Property Rights in (Ostrom 2000: 352-379) and the Digital Library on the Commons mentioned above), but their most important theoretical distinctions are worth reviewing, since some can be useful to the anti-capitalist commonist movement.

Of course, the primary one is between common property and open access regimes, since the confusion between them is the basis of Hardin's deduction of the tragedy of the common. Common property regimes are "where the members of a clearly demarcated group have a legal right to exclude nonmembers of that group from using a resource. Open access regimes (res nullius)-including the classic cases of the open seas and the atmosphere-have long been considered in legal doctrine as involving no limits on who is authorized to use a resource" (Ostrom 2000: 335-336). On the basis of this distinction, common property and open access regimes are mutually exclusive and anyone who had as their political ideal the creation of an open access regime would not be a supporter of the commons.

The second important distinction is between a common-pool resource (which is a thing or stuff) and a common property regime (which is a set of social relations). A common-pool resource is such that (a) "it is costly to exclude individuals from using the good either through physical barriers or legal instruments and (b) the benefits consumed by one individual subtract from the benefits available to others" (Ostrom 2000: 337). Because of its two defining characteristics, a common-pool resource is subject to problems of congestion, overuse and potential destruction. Access to, withdrawal from, management and ownership of such a resource can be in the form of a common property regime, but it need not be. "Examples exist of both successful and unsuccessful efforts to govern and manage common-pool resources by governments, communal groups, cooperatives, voluntary associations, and private individuals or firms" (Ostrom 2000: 338). Much of the work of the neo-Hardinians has been to study what attributes of common-pool resources that "are conducive to the use of communal proprietorship or ownership" and what attributes of common-pool resources that "are conducive to individual rights to withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation" (Ostrom 2000: 332).

The neo-Hardinians, however, seem to be less interested in the fact that not all common property regimes involve common-pool resources. On the contrary, when we examine the history of common property regimes, we must conclude that many have been based on non-common-pool resources. For example, money income, personal belongings, literary texts, and even children have been communalized. Thus the 15th century Taborites' first act of forming their community was to dump all their personal belongings in large open chests and begin their communal relations on an even footing (Federici 2004: 54). On the basis of the history of common property regimes it is difficult to decide what types of goods are "conducive" to private property and what kinds of goods are "conducive" to common property.

The third important distinction is between common-pool resources (e.g., a fishery, a river) and public goods (e.g., knowledge of a physical law, living in a just and peaceful society). They share one characteristic, i.e., it is difficult to exclude people living within the scope of these resources or goods from their enjoyment. But they also differ in another characteristic, for a common-pool resource like a fishery is reduced when something of value like a particular fish is withdrawn from it while a public good like knowledge of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not diminished when still another person uses it to construct a new engine." (http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/papers/caffentzis.htm)

Christian Siefkes on sources for common property

"How things become common property:

• Cost recovery: sharers may ask for voluntary suggested contributions, as long as there are still uncovered costs (money that has been spent to buy or maintain the goods).

• Donations: people donate goods or money to buy goods to the commons.

• Collections: projects collect money in order to buy common property (distributed donations).

Common property (goods that are partially and totally community-owned) are still maintained by the initial sharers, but they can’t be sold/re-privatized—if the initial sharers choose not to maintain them any more, they “float” to somebody else within the Network.

Common property is always transitive: goods produced using them are common property, too.

Costs only arise when something must be bought since it isn’t available in the Network. Ideally, costs should become lower over time, as more and more goods and tools are produced and freely distributed in the Commons Network." (http://www.keimform.de/2008/09/08/hiddinghausen-talks-2-commons-network/)

More Information

1. Property; Collaborative Goods; Peer Property
2. Trusts

Bibliography:

1. Common Rights vs. Collective Rights: contrasting common and collective property.
2. Ostrom, Elinor. 2000. "Private and Common Property Rights", in Encyclopedia

of Law and Economics, Vol. II: Civil Law and Economics, , pages 332-379. Ghent, Belgium: University of Ghent.