Posted on 11/21/2017 9:30:45 PM PST by Kaslin
Ready for Thanksgiving? Before you eat that turkey, I hope you think about why America has turkeys for you to eat. Most people don't know.
Everyone's heard about that first Thanksgiving feast -- Pilgrims and Indians sharing the harvest. We like the drawings of it we saw in schoolbooks -- shared bounty.
Fewer people know that before that first feast, the Pilgrims nearly starved.
They almost starved because they acted the way some Bernie Sanders fans want people to act. They farmed collectively.
But communal farming creates what economists call "the tragedy of the commons."
Think about what happens if a bunch of ranchers hold land in common. Everyone brings cattle to graze. While that sounds nice, it also means every rancher has an incentive to bring lots of cattle to the pasture. They bring cow after cow until the pasture is overgrazed -- destroyed.
For this week's YouTube video, I repeated an experiment economics teachers sometimes do to demonstrate the tragedy of the commons.
I assembled a group of people, put coins on the floor in front of them and said, "I'll give you a dollar for each coin you pick up. But if you leave them down there for a minute, I'll give you two bucks per coin, and then three bucks. Each minute the coins increase in value by a dollar."
If the group waited, they'd make more money.
Did they wait? No.
As soon as I said "Go!" everyone frantically grabbed for coins. No one wanted to wait because someone else would have gotten the money.
Ready for Thanksgiving? Before you eat that turkey, I hope you think about why America has turkeys for you to eat. Most people don't know.
Everyone's heard about that first Thanksgiving feast -- Pilgrims and Indians sharing the harvest. We like the drawings of it we saw in schoolbooks -- shared bounty.
Fewer people know that before that first feast, the Pilgrims nearly starved.
They almost starved because they acted the way some Bernie Sanders fans want people to act. They farmed collectively.
But communal farming creates what economists call "the tragedy of the commons."
Think about what happens if a bunch of ranchers hold land in common. Everyone brings cattle to graze. While that sounds nice, it also means every rancher has an incentive to bring lots of cattle to the pasture. They bring cow after cow until the pasture is overgrazed -- destroyed.
For this week's YouTube video, I repeated an experiment economics teachers sometimes do to demonstrate the tragedy of the commons.
I assembled a group of people, put coins on the floor in front of them and said, "I'll give you a dollar for each coin you pick up. But if you leave them down there for a minute, I'll give you two bucks per coin, and then three bucks. Each minute the coins increase in value by a dollar."
If the group waited, they'd make more money.
Did they wait? No.
As soon as I said "Go!" everyone frantically grabbed for coins. No one wanted to wait because someone else would have gotten the money.
Oh wait...you just *did*. ☺
Anyway, he is correct. Private ownership is the key of success. Not just on a personal level but on a societal level. Doesn't mean everyone succeeds, but those who utilize and maintain their property do.
John Stossel should do a segment on rent control. How "community" leaders take away private ownership and hand it to renters who don't best utilize or maintain a property. Same principle, where many renters are unsuccessful versus those who own property.
I am VERY thankful for Oxygen!
Not to mention that the owner soon loses incentive to maintain the property as well.
I am thankful I don’t live in Venezuela.
They are starving because a popular socialist, much like Bernie Sanders, actually succeeded in implementing socialism.
Now the oil-rich OPEC member country’s people are eating their pets and zoo animals to keep from starving. The average weight loss of Venezuelans was 17 pounds two years ago, back when food supplies were more plentiful.
And they haven’t hit rock bottom yet.
Kaslin you really have to start proofeading a little better for double-posting in your excerpts.
“Private ownership is the key of success.”
While correct, your statement of Stossel’s thesis is only half the story. You can only enjoy the fruits of that private ownership if there is something that ensures the system of ownership. In the beginning, that was accomplished by force of arms. By the time this nation’s Founders came on the scene, more civilized methods had evolved and been codified. The most celebrated to that time was the Magna Carta. The Founders set out to learn from that by creating the Constitution and a system of laws that would be a framework to ensure private property.
Of course, today the issue is keeping the government created by that Constitution from creating laws, regulations, and court decisions that infringe on private ownership. Things that spring to mind here include Wickard v. Filburn and the more recent Waters of the US.
One good example is hunting on private property vs public land. People shoot everything they see on state land until there is little left. Why would you let a young deer grow when the next guy will it tomorrow?
On private property people only harvest a minimal amount, because they want it to continue to be good hunting.
The number one reason I loathed BO and his cohorts so much. They had absolutely no respect for private property rights. They changed laws on their own in order to tell big land owners what they can and cannot do with their own land and the water on it. We dodge a bullet getting Trump, the Dems are big time totalitarians and they are not going away.
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