Art, a nicely done and balanced balanced piece. However, it seems to me that you left out or did nbot sufficiently stress a few things that would be useful to your readers:

- the fact that resources are not priced doesn`t mean they aren`t valuable, but simply that they are unowned;

- in such cases, those with differing preferences may be unable to use market mechanisms to express their preferences;

- the result is often politicized debates over who “wins” at the government level (as government may own or may regulate the resource) or in PR wars;

- the emotional/sweat/financial investments people make in such struggles are themselves strong evidence of the value of the expressed preference;

- what is “property” is a function of the value of the resource and the efforts that people invest into turning “common” resources into “owned” and protected resources (including investments in institutional infrastructure), so (as Mises and Yandle have pointed out) there is a continual evolution of what is property as preferences, uses and the relative costs of capturing, using and husbanding/defending change;

- economists and Austrians recognize that, in response to of the nature of the resource and existing technology/institutions, property may as well be well-functioning “community” property (with rules of use, sanctions and exclusions of outsiders), not simply private property (there are lots of examples of well-functioning common property systems;

- economists – particularly libertarian ones – can serve a useful role in the problem-solving effort that is needed with respect to unowned or unprotected resources.

Sincerely,

TT