Comments on: Incentives matter (to fishermen and other living creatures) http://cafehayek.com/2008/09/incentives-matt.html where orders emerge Mon, 16 Jan 2012 02:06:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: Harold Kyriazi http://cafehayek.com/2008/09/incentives-matt.html/comment-page-1#comment-30617 Harold Kyriazi Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:13:47 +0000 http://localhost/wordpress/?p=3028#comment-30617 <p>Any comment on how to handle the allocation of those ITQs? The Economist article says it can be messy: "Allocating catch shares is a difficult and often fraught process. In America it can take from five to 15 years, says Joe Sullivan, a partner in Mundt MacGregor, a law firm based in Seattle. The public, he says, sometimes resists the privatisation of a public resource and if government gets too involved in the details of the privatisation (rather than leaving it to the fishermen to work out), it can end up politically messy."</p> <p>I recommend auctioning them off every year, and then distributing the proceeds as a Citizen's Dividend (like Alaska's Permanent Fund does with oil revenues). That way, the public gets a direct, per capita compensation for giving up their individual right to fish. And, it prevents a barrier to entry of new fishermen, who aren't grandfathered in to the system (as today's fishermen would be if they were the ones to decide how to divvy up the public resource).</p> Any comment on how to handle the allocation of those ITQs? The Economist article says it can be messy: "Allocating catch shares is a difficult and often fraught process. In America it can take from five to 15 years, says Joe Sullivan, a partner in Mundt MacGregor, a law firm based in Seattle. The public, he says, sometimes resists the privatisation of a public resource and if government gets too involved in the details of the privatisation (rather than leaving it to the fishermen to work out), it can end up politically messy."

I recommend auctioning them off every year, and then distributing the proceeds as a Citizen's Dividend (like Alaska's Permanent Fund does with oil revenues). That way, the public gets a direct, per capita compensation for giving up their individual right to fish. And, it prevents a barrier to entry of new fishermen, who aren't grandfathered in to the system (as today's fishermen would be if they were the ones to decide how to divvy up the public resource).

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