I am subscribing to a very interesting blog, which often publish thought provoking posts. The latest one is touching on social and economic cost of our behavior. You can click here to link to the post so you can read it in it’s entirety. The comments are also quite interesting.
…anything that is a commons will have this tendency to retain and increase value, as long as the cost of repair is kept at least as low as the cost of damage.
I started kicking it around in other contexts and the answer seemed to come out the same. It made me understand more about urban graffiti and about vandalism. Then, more recently, I saw this article, about chewing gum. So it costs 3p to buy a piece of chewing gum and 10p to clean up after it.
And it made me think. Wouldn’t that look a little unfair to a non-chewer? The chewer gets the benefit, the manufacturer makes the profit, and the taxpayer foots the bill.
We are inheritors of the tradition which values social justice and communal fairness so much, that our forefathers invested uncounted years in documenting seemingly minute details of fair and just ways to relate to each other, and to community. Today we seem to satisfy our desires for improvements by protesting the status quo and hotly debating issues we have no control over instead of “noodling” over specific, constructive ideas for change we can actualize in our own personal lives.
