The Tragedy of No Commons

How one white supremacist’s rejection of economic common sense stuck

I don’t usually get upset when I see The New York Times screw up. Most of the journalists are trying their best to get things right, pressured for time, and scared for their jobs in a shrinking industry.

Still, that’s no excuse for David Leonhardt’s companion piece this morning to an otherwise rigorous report on groundwater depletion in America. They called it “Uncharted Waters: The threat to groundwater is a classic tragedy of the commons.”

In the piece, he correctly explains how if every person and every business use all the water they want, there won’t be enough. But he goes on to call this phenomenon “The Tragedy of the Commons,” crediting ecologist Garrett Hardin — a nativist, anti-immigration eugenicist. As he wrote as late as 1991, “Diversity is the opposite of unity, and unity is a prime requirement for national survival.” Or “popular anthropology came along with its dogma that all cultures are equally good and valuable. To say otherwise was to be narrow-minded and prejudiced, to be guilty of the sin of ethnocentrism… . That which was foreign and strange, particularly if persecuted, became the ideal. Black became beautiful.” And “My position is that this idea of a multiethnic society is a disaster. The human species may not…