Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

a fable that capitalists adopted from the Stanford eco-racist anti-population milieu: the “tragedy of the commons.” In six pages published in the journal Science in December of 1968, the Stanford-trained ecologist Garrett Hardin asserted that the public “commons” was by its nature subject to abuse by maximizing actors. A bigot and cofounder of the anti-immigrant group FAIR, Hardin was worried about population specifically. “In a welfare state,” he begs the question, “how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement?”18 One step away from neo-Nazism, this rhetoric wore the cloak of environmentalism during the Nixon years, but by the time of the Reagan administration, the musing philosophy paper that had no business in a scientific publication in the first place had ballooned to an existential truth that applied to public goods in general. As the economy advanced, the state had to “enclose” an increasing number of commons to make sure they weren’t misused, either by overexploitation or, just as concerning, underexploitation, since, as we know, capital is reluctant to enter new markets where it can’t protect its initial position. This represented a change in the ideology, from recognizing the need to build up an intellectual-property commons for new industries to creating the best investment climate possible by constraining the spread of new tech.