The tragedy of the commons is the observation that ceteris paribus, no one has an incentive to preserve an unowned resource, and, on the contrary, everyone has an incentive to get as much of an unowned resource as quickly as possible (before others do), even if this has long-term detrimental effects on the existence of the resource. The remedy for the tragedy of the commons is property.
Property is matter subject to human ownership. In order to own property, a human being must have the rights to use and determine who may use the property, earn income from the property, transfer the property, destroy the property, and enforce property rights. The right to enforce property rights, together with the incentive to preserve one's own property, is sufficient to ward off the depletion of a resource that occurs in the tragedy of the commons.
In the corporatist system that we live in, fishing rights have traditionally, but illogically been excluded from being property and have instead been considered to be a res nullius---something that's free for all takers.
Read reference article #1
Read reference article #2
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, a large number of Vietnamese refugees were re-settled in the U.S.
"In the United States, immigration agents asked Congress to scatter the incoming refugees across the country in order to prevent 'ghettoism.' This resettlement policy led to the creation of Vietnamese communities in states such as Texas that had relatively little previous experience with Asian Americans. In Texas, many of the new arrivals, facing language barriers and having little capital, found opportunity in the Gulf Coast shrimping industry. 'We like the weather, we like the shrimping, we like a chance to start our own businesses...'"Conflicts arose between the American and Vietnamese fishermen. American fishermen
"... considered the Vietnamese fishermen's aggressive practices, such as following their competitors' boats to a catch, and unloading their boats across other boats' decks, to be unethical and unfair."The financial success of the hardworking Vietnamese fishermen was seen by white American fishermen to be
"... at the expense of the American Tax payer and a delicate fishing industry we used to take care of that they have wiped smooth out."General cultural differences and the fact that the Vietnamese fishermen spoke little if any English were factors that played no small role in the conflict.
One interesting thing that I noticed while reading about this was that there was a de facto system of fishing rights in effect prior to the arrival of the Vietnamese fishermen.
"The families there had, for generations, set up their family areas."In other words, a process of Lockean homesteading had resulted in a locally-recognized system of ownership of fishing rights. Unfortunately for these owners, governments, state and federal, didn't recognize fishing rights as a thing that could possibly be owned, and Vietnamese fishermen were deemed by the legal system to have the right to fish in the res nullius fishing grounds of the Gulf Coast.
Subsequent decline in shrimp, crab and other fisheries can be explained by the tragedy of the commons, though competition from foreign shrimp allowed Gulf shrimp a respite.
To sum up, the free market is based on the idea of property. Without property there can be no such thing as exchange. To the extent that a hampered market functions at all, it too must entail property, though not necessarily in a consistent or just way.
The actually-existing hampered seafood markets are a res nullius kept from collapse at taxpayer expense by poorly-functioning government regulations.
The organic development of property in fishing rights that occurred in the Gulf prior to government intervention was a brief glimpse into the workings of a theoretical free market.
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