| There is a widely-held view among philosophers and economists that private property, or private ownership, is the preferred end state for all scarce resources. Those who hold this view have not looked closely enough at a resource like water in the American West. This dissertation examines the case of water in the West; it shows that because of the resource's 'factor endowments', e.g., its degrees of jointness, divisibility and excludability, one individual's use of the resource creates significant negative externalities for other users. In such situations, private ownership is an ineffective means for protecting individuals' interests. Those interests can be better protected by splitting the various rights of ownership between individual resource users and the 'resource community' to which they belong. A conception of this form of common ownership, a 'common-property arrangement', is developed, and it is shown that such an arrangement can function effectively for water in the West. More generally, this dissertation offers and expanded framework of 'ownership', or rights-relationships, within which to discuss and attempt to resolve problems of resource scarcity.; Some authors have written that John Locke's account of property provides the descriptive and normative basis for the private ownership of water in the West. I argue, however, that Locke's account of property is inadequate for water and other resources with similar factor endowments. Because Locke failed to think carefully enough about the variable nature of resources, he overstated the desirability of private ownership for all external goods. Economists, too, have tended to overstate the desirability of private ownership. Although they recognize that private ownership may not be perfectly suited to all resources, they are nonetheless skeptical about any 'common ownership' alternatives. I show that this skepticism is unwarranted, and that it results from a conflation of 'open access' with 'common ownership'. The former describes a state of affairs where there are no rights-relationships at all, whereas the latter denotes a situation where definite property rights have been established. Because they have conflated two different situations, economists have tended to think that Prisoner's Dilemma, or "tragedy of the commons," problems are endemic to all 'common ownership' situations. It is shown that they are not. When the rights-relationship among members of a resource community is based on shared expectations of reciprocal behavior, then a common-property arrangement can function effectively to control the overuse of scarce resources. |
