Losing the commons: Peter Barnes on our lost land and history
I’m not sure what I think of the argument yet–it’s one that could use more data than presented here in this excerpt in Guernica–and yet it’s certainly a foreboding question if true. My favorite quote:
What’s astonishing about these takings isn’t that they occur, but how unaware of them the average citizen is. As another Republican, former Secretary of the Interior and Alaska governor Walter Hickel said, “If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.”
This piece in Guernica is from Peter Barnes book Capitalism 3.0. What I get from it is rehashed natural capital theory, which hasn’t helped us on the ground so far in the three decades of its existence, no matter how significant the theory. But that doesn’t mean it will can never and will never win people over.
