the moon and the tragedy of the refrigerator
property rights key building blocks of lunar settlement?
posted by jmorrison on 09/20 | permalink | send entry

your previous post about water on the asteroid ceres got me researching a bit. i found a link that stated ceres contains enough material to build o’neill space colonies totaling about 170 times earth’s land area! i couldn’t seem to find out how much you’d weigh on ceres (it’s 600 miles across, about equal to texas, and the only asteroid big enough to be really round; however, it’s 1/6 earth grav on the moon, so it must be much less on ceres, which makes tunneling and shooting raw material into space pretty damn easy). whoever jams a flag into ceres, i was thinking, becomes the first space trillionaire.

posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/21  at  01:31 AM


ah, i’ve just read the link. dinkin is a bit of an ideological economic conservative, and some of his reasoning is weak.

the tragedy of the commons is an economic parable about a village of dairy farmers sharing a common grazing ground. each can have a cow grazing there and there will be enough grass for all the cattle. however, a given farmer can profit by adding more cattle, thus privatizing some of the common resource. all the farmers have an incentive to do this, so they will overgraze and eventually starve.

dinkin writes: “If there is one person who wants to squat on a homestead on the Moon and build a shack and another who wants to build a rocket port, who should get to? In the first-come-first-serve world of races to claim and use common property, the shack would get built if the shack builder got there first. In the property rights world, a rich shack builder who likes a view could get the shack built only if he could pay (or was not willing to take) the money offered by the rocket port developer.”

but this is the moon we’re talking about! it’s a place where, for the most part, one place is as good as another. for a space port, almost any site is acceptable, with equatorial areas preferred. other than that, it’s only a question of sunlight availability (some craters don’t get much), mineral rights (perhaps there are some desirable deposits) and especially water (there’s a certain amount in the deep, shaded craters at the south pole). what’s wrong with squatting and then selling to a developer? that’s what pioneers do!

so i, too, favor the ability to own land there, but there do have to be limits of some sort; dinkin offers eminent domain as a way to lose one’s land, but eminent domain abuse as we have seen it lately here is that a homeowner can lose property to a wealthy entity who then has full property rights, thus trending toward monopolization; one can imagine a country like ours gradually becoming like a banana republic where the vast majority own no land at all!

as for extraterrestrial real estate, i imagine in practice the situation would shake itself out. like in colonial america, the old country’s laws fall by the wayside if the old country is too far away to enforce them.

posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/21  at  01:53 AM


The refrigerator often runs out of food because the students are more interested in eating the food than stocking it. The dishes in the sink tend to pile up. These are classic cases of overconsumption and underinvestment when there are not exclusive property rights, a problem economists call the “Tragedy of the Commons”.

posted by Refrigerator service  on  08/18  at  10:04 AM


Hi,
How come if the property values in states such as FL have decreased, property taxes haven’t?
In states such as FL where property values have greatly decreased in a range of 50K-100K, how come the property taxes haven’t? Would we see a decrease in this year’s tax bills at the end of the year?

posted by caribbean property  on  09/11  at  09:22 AM


I am also to give it. Thanks ;)

posted by leeds water coolers  on  10/20  at  07:12 AM


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