|
|
|
Jewish World Review Feb. 16, 2005 / 7 Adar I, 5765 Selfishness is bad, right? By John Stossel
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"Public" is good. Better than "private." Sharing is good.
Private property is selfish. That was what people told ABC News. As one man
put it, "Society would clearly be better off if we all shared more." Some
kids even sang, "Sharing is caring."
That's what we all are taught. But if kids get Tori Haidinger in
high school, they learn a different lesson. The California teacher invites
kids to experience basic economics firsthand: "You are the head of a family
that is fed by catching fish," she says. "Our fish are Hershey's Kisses. You
will get to eat them." Each table gets a beaker of Kisses. She tells the
kids, "Share them with your friends. You can take as many as you want, but
any left over will reproduce, just like fish, because I will double them."
What happens? The kids quickly empty their beakers. No more Kisses.
That's what has happened in the real world, too. The supply of
fish in the world's oceans has dropped because the oceans and the fish
swimming through them are public property — shared property. The oceans are
full of fishermen who know that if they don't catch a fish, the next guy
might, so they have very little reason to cut back on fishing: The fish they
leave behind aren't feeding their own future — they're feeding their
competitors. As one of Haidinger's students said, "I was thinking ... I
probably should share, but I didn't think anybody else was sharing, so I
took more." Economists call this "the tragedy of the commons."
Then, Haidinger tries a different tack. She gives each student a
private beaker of Kisses. "What this has actually done," she says, is
establish "a sense of privatization." It's as if each student had a private
pond and owned all the fish in it.
"Privatization" has a bad reputation, but this time, no student
overfishes. Kids leave enough in their ponds so the teacher can double their
number, and so new generations of chocolate Kisses are born. "So," asks a
student, "are you saying that if it's ours, we will care more about it?"
"Yup." Owning is caring.
Compare a typical public toilet to a private toilet. Public
toilets tend to be filthy. But private toilets, common in Europe, are clean.
Their owners, selfishly seeking a profit — you have to pay a small fee to
use them — work at keeping them clean. And think about your office
refrigerator. The one I use at "20/20" is disgusting. There's cottage cheese
in there that expired over a year ago. The refrigerator is covered with
ancient spills, and you can't believe the smell. When something belongs to
everyone, it really belongs to no one, and no one takes care of it. Sharing
can be a mess.
Why does the United States have so many catastrophic forest
fires? Did you know that most of them are on government land, land we share?
The feds own only a third of the forests, but they have most of the forest
fires. Private forests are less likely to burn because the livelihood of
"greedy" timber companies depends on having healthy trees. So the companies
clear out the underbrush. The government, managing land we all share, is
less careful, and so thousands of acres burn.
There are two cases where sharing may be better than private
control. As Thomas Jefferson pointed out, the "peculiar character" of an
idea is that "no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the
whole of it." If you catch a fish, I can no longer catch it, but if you
learn something I know, I still know it. That's why ideas are different from
physical goods.
The other case is where the people doing the sharing have a
special bond, for example, because they're very close friends or members of
a happy family. Mutual caring — the kind of love that makes another person
more important to you than almost anyone else, when we feel another's gains
and losses as our own — can make sharing work.
But most of us don't feel that way about the whole country. My
wife and I share our car, but if we shared it with the whole town, the car
would soon be trashed. Private property sounds selfish, and we're taught
that selfishness is bad. But it works.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
© 2005, by JFS Productions, Inc. Distributed by Creators Syndicate, Inc. | |||||||||||
