Letters to the Editor
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The Tragedy of the Commons
Interesting article Shooter linked to: if the author is correct, then the tragedy of the commons was a driving force in the impoverishment of the early Puritan community (some of my relatives!).
There was also a bit of sleight of hand there, since the sharing that is extolled to schoolchildren is generally the sharing between the Native Americans and the Puritans, not that amongst the Puritans. Though that doesn't detract from the author's point, it is sort of ironic that while the author is doing a takedown on sharing, he is silent about how sharing benefited the Puritans as well as hurt them.
In your previous post Shooter said something along the lines of "This (capitalism) is the best system for maximizing production and distributing resources effectively."
I can agree, and I think many others can too, that this is the main goal: getting the stuff we need made and figuring out how to get it to the people who need the stuff. However, even capitalism itself has evolved over the years and even now is practiced in many different ways. Who is to say that what we have now is the final version? That would contradict all of human experience. Are we not always learning from the past, making improvements, inventing new things? Change is not only possible, it's inevitable. The question is, do we want to meet change with resistance or flow with it?