Established precedent then extends the applicability of cited legislation and lowers the cost successive claims. Property owners gradually lose their ability to finance the cost of com¬pliance or legal resistance. Absent a profitable use, the market value of the target use approaches zero. After repeated exercise of external con¬trols, pur¬chase of the residual asset value concludes any remaining claim by an owner.
When a rival owner produces a competing or substitute good, the financial advantages of such tacit property acquisitions can be enormous. For example, if a developer funded public concerns about the negatively valued transfor¬mation products of farming to render the use of farmland non-economic and ripe for development, the land becomes less expensive to purchase.
This politically-sponsored dissolution of the Separation of Powers Principle, combines all three branches of government into one, that can derive power and funding by manufacturing claims on the use of property. The more exter¬nalities are regulated, the more power accrues to the agency to control the use of the producing asset to turn its use to corrupt purpose. When agency control is sufficient to alienate the interest of the agent from the democratic majority, the asset has then degenerated into a socialized commons.
The claims by which a commons is socialized are ironically often the same precedents as were used to extend the original democratic claim; i.e., by ex¬tending claims against the transformation products of the democratic use of the resource. With the legal precedents in place that were used to take control of the factors of production on individual property, the civic agent now has the legal tools to take control of ALL related private property. Control of the use of land is now in the hands of an agency that is alienated from accountability to the public claim for healthy ecosystem function. The agency instead serves the limited interests of the politically dominant, who use the power of government to gain de facto control of ALL factors of production.
History teaches that this is not a good thing.
A socialized commons is an evil to the environment because the resource is under a controlling agent with no structural motive to prevent or eliminate ecological problems. Quite the contrary, civic management of the environ¬ment not only doesn’t work, it has every reason not to work. As eco¬logical problems worsen and resulting economic crises deepen, the power acceded to government agencies expands!
Commons are factor inputs to all economic goods. The power to socialize commons by regulation is the power to transfer control of ALL factors of production to government.