RE: The idea that supply and demand will manage this, I'm not so sure.
1. You don't have private ownership of the stock. Therefore there is no applicability of of ideas relative to enlightened use of the resources from an owners POV.
There is no private ownership, but there is a COST of ownership which is the important factor. As resources become more scarce the cost of ownership increases, it takes more time and energy to acquire the same amount of fish as previously. Because costs increase, prices must also increase but in a constrained environment because initially you will have the same number of boats chasing fewer fish. Therefore, fish yields per boat will decrease, costs/fish increase and even though prices must go up the less efficient fishing operations will be driven out of business by intolerably low profit margins or negative cash flow.
2. Your idea that it will self regulate assumes (though I don't think you are aware of it) a random distribution of the resource throughout the sea. But that is not the case. There are a few spots, that can be found where the fishing is still very good, those spots are fewer and fewer, but those who find them can still fish them to death.
No doubt. The fisherman who can consistently yield more fish will defeat the lesser capable fisherman who must cease operating. Once the lesser capable fisherman have ceased operating then total number of fishing vessels decline and less surface area of the ocean is scoured. Previously low-yield regions will be freer to regenerate, and indeed may even remain untouched for long periods since there will be fewer boats "scouting" new territories. Opportunity will exist to repopulate.
3. I doubt COd or Haddock will become totally extinct, but without some sort of private ownership of the entire habitat or regulated management of it, they will be useless. NOte most regulation doesn't work. Depending on the type of fish, you need to be very smart and apply different forms of regulation. For some fish, those that live real deep, a size limit is meaningless, because once you bring them up from that deep, if they are too small and you let them go, they just die. For those situations you need totally ban on fishing for a season. I'm sure you are familiar with the situation with striped bass. They are back, for real, and they really were gone. And it would seem difficult to make a case that that isn't a good thing, or that the government didn't do it.
The striped-bass is a different situation than primary sea-yields such as cod, plaice, haddock etc. There are no alternate fish to replace cod, plaice, haddock etc. The government can prematurely drive the cost of ownership higher to drive out less efficient operations, and price the products higher so that demand synthetically decreases. If done intelligently it would encourage the accelerated development of salt water fisheries. That's good. But the government does very little intelligently, the free-markets will find the best solutions. If the government merely accelerates a truly inevitable situation perhaps that's not so bad. But we must still confirm the true nature of the situation, and somehow guarantee that government regulation does not do more harm than good by omnibus loading of biased regulations. (biased by political preference, corporate preference and religious preference (envirodoctrinairians)). I have no confidence we can manage the government regulation succesfully.
4. Fish farming is the what the market is proposing to solve this problem. More fish cheaper. As the techniques improve and the ocean stock is reduced, certain varieties will become more prevalent as a farmed fish. As long as we are O.K. with getting our fish from a controlled genetic pool and having no sport fishing to speak of this might work. The market is brutal, it will solve particular problems. But if one of those problems is the idea that the sea should be full of fish that sport fishers can catch cheap, that could become prohibitively expensive to solve. But the consumers of that 'good' have experienced it their whole lives and don't see why it can't continue to be so. The market doesn't gurrantee any problem will be solved at the price we'd all like it to be solved at.
Farmed fish are great capitalistic solutions. Forestry and fresh-water fish are excellent precedents. I'm not worried about genetics, that is easily managed, should it become problematic, through replenishment of the gene pool.
Sport fishing is irrelevent. One fish per millions.
For instance, we might have more elephants today if we allowed them to be aggressively bred in captivity so that we might harvest their tusks (provided the market in ivory justifies the expense). However, we let the government attempt to solve the problem by abolishing demand entirely. Instead leaving an underground market, and the killing of wild elephants with much more devastating results to their population. Farm bred elephants would have eliminated the success for wild-kills by driving the price of ivory down, and making it more available. Wild poached elephants would have ceased much quicker and effectiv ely. There is no reason we couldn't breed elephants for profit as we do other cattle, except for romantic notions. Now, there is no profit in breeding elephants. pity.
Be careful about applying "free market" assumptions when there is no private ownership.
The cost of ownership is the determing factor. The cost increases as supplies decline, thus free-market principles will work smoothly. Nothing regulates markets more effectively than the $$ and the cost of ownership versus the margin of sales.
Regards,
PS: Can you detail more about the striped-bass situation? Is it truly analagous?
Some test-cases gave tribes ownership of the elephant herds. Now, instead of killing them, farmers had an incentive to protect them. The tribes (and nation) began to aggressively court tourists AND hunters.
Within a few years, the elephant herds had DOUBLED in number.
The striped-bass situation is one which highlights my point that fish are not evenly distributed. Apparently (I'm no expert) virtually all striped bass spawn in the Chesepeake. Therefore, without some controls there, not only would the species thin, it could almost completely disappear. For some species, the idea that they can simply multiply off of banks where the fishing boats have abandoned their efforts may not always be true. The controls put in place proved to be quite effective at increasing the population of striped bass in the 28-36 inch sporting range. (Don't get me wrong, sportsmen would love 46 inchers but I haven't seen much of that. One problem the stripers have is they are so darn good eating. If someone catches 6 and takes home 1 it is probably one of the top 2 or 3 he caught that day that gets eaten. You can't know for sure since you make the call to keep it or put it back on the spot. Who can pass up 15 lbs of cleaned bass on the table?) It was an example of government enforced management practices that "worked" from the POV of most anglers I know.
On the whole I don't really disagree with anything you've said. I just wanted to highlight some of the market's rough edges that are especially apparent in the field of wildlife management and fisheries it seems.
Rippin