The Tragedy of the UNREGULATED Commons

The Tragedy of the UNREGULATED Commons
OR
Why when everyone owns something, no one actually owns it.
I just finished reading an article today called “The Tragedy of the Commons” written by Garrett Hardin. This article got me thinking about politics and I wanted to take his ideas and put my own thoughts with it, specifically my thoughts on the “social commons” as it pertains to the American Election of 2008.
Imagine the following:
There is a town where all the land is owned by the ten families living in the town. The land is in the middle of the town and all the houses surround the field. All the families in the town own ten cows which are sold to make money. The land can only support 100 cows; anymore and the land begins to die. Everything is great and all the families make enough money to live with their families. However, one of the families realizes that if they put one extra cow in the field they can earn enough money to move to the town down the street. When the family leaves the land will recover as their eleven cows will be gone, and bring the land back to balance.
Sounds quite ordinary, right? In this example the town has decided that the land in communal and shared by everyone, thus everyone has an interest in keeping the land healthy. This logic is sound, but fails when the human element is brought in. The family has rationalized that if they hurt the commons a little, it will hurt everyone just a little and allow the family to make a great gain. But what happens when other families put more cows on the land to try and move to the same town?
In this case each family will follow the same rational. If their family can earn enough to move out, it will be better for the remaining families after they leave. So everyone starts to put more cows into the pasture. This causes the pasture to die. In order to make enough to live, each family must now put more cows on what is left of the grass thus accelerating the death of the grass.
In the end, no one family saw the land as their land and did not take ownership of the land. In fact a pure mathematical look tells us that if one family had taken the strategy, it would have worked out fine. It was when everyone else wanted the same thing that the situation fell apart. This is exactly what happened in the real world example of Boston Common. Some families bought more cattle and in the end the Common was closed to everyone.
This tragedy is occurring in our world today and is also part of the tragedy that makes many utopian ideas fail. The world oceans are over fished because they are owned by everyone but only very specific persons receive the gains. As such, each specific person will fish more to gain more, but in the end hurt everyone. Rivers and the ocean are used for pollution disposal for the same reasons as the fictitious town would use up the common grass.
So why does this apply to the 2008 Election?
Well, we have to be careful that we do not create a system of 'commons' the Americans will come to rely on. If we start to 'give away' services that everyone can use, then everyone is going to use the commons to destruction. This will obviously cause a degradation in services and an increase in cost, saving nothing and hurting everyone.
The idea of universal health care falls under this theory of over usage. While health care should be accessible by everyone as a basic service, there is a risk that if everyone MUST use a 'common' plan that they do not pay for (that is to say they pay taxes but not a usage, or deductible, fee) the the system will become overused and everyone will suffer in the end.
We cannot allow our country to let things become everyone's 'commons' as it will ultimately lead to everyone having nothing. This could be universal health care or universal wealth. If people do not feel ownership of what they are using, or a connection to the owner of what they are using, the end result will generally be destruction of whatever the 'common' is.

Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons", Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859 (December 13, 1968), pp. 1243-1248.