Comment by lo_zamoyski

It was not my intent to be exhaustive, but to make a few points that left it up to the reader to relate them appropriately to your post in order to enrich thinking about the subject.

But it appears we cannot avoid getting into the weeds a bit…

> Governments and corporations don't exist in nature.

This is not as simple as you seem to think.

The claim “don’t exist in nature” is vague, because the word “nature” in common speech is vague. What is “natural”? Is a beehive “natural” Is a house “natural”? Is synthetic water “natural”? (I claim that the concept of “nature” concerns what it means to be some kind of thing. Perhaps polystyrene has never existed before human beings synthesized it, but it has a nature, that is, it means something to be polystyrene. And it is in the nature of human beings to make materials and artifacts, i.e., to produce technology ordered toward the human good.)

So, what is government? Well, it is an authority whose central purpose is to function as the guardian and steward of the common good. I claim that parenthood is the primordial form of human government and the family as the primordial form of the state. We are intrinsically social and political animals; legitimate societies exist only when joined by a common good. This is real and part of human nature. The capacity to deviate from human nature does not disprove the norm inherent to it.

Now, procedurally we could institute various particular and concrete arrangements through which government is actualized. We could institute a republican form of government or a monarchy, for example. These are historically conditioned. But in all cases, there is a government. Government qua government is not some arbitrary “construct”, but something proper to all forms and levels of human society.

> "Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem.

We can talk about coordination once we establish the ends for which such coordination is needed, but there is something more fundamental that must be said about the framing of the problem of the “tragedy”. The framing does not presume a notion of human beings as moral agents and political and social creatures. In other words, it begins with a highly individualist, homo economicus view of human nature as rationally egoist and oriented toward maximizing utility, full stop. But I claim that is not in accord with human nature and thus the human good, even if people can fall into such pathological patterns of behavior (especially in a culture that routinely reinforces that norm).

As I wrote, human beings are inherently social animals. We cannot flourish outside of societies. A commons that suffers this sort of unhinged extraction is an example of a moral and a political failure. Why? Because it is unjust, intemperate, and a lack of solidarity to maximize resource extraction in that manner. So the tragedy is a matter of a) the moral failure of the users of that resource, and b) the failure of an authority to regulate its use. The typical solution that’s proposed is either privatization or centralization, but both solutions presuppose the false anthropology of homo economicus. (I am not claiming that privatization does not have a place, only that the dichotomy is false.)

Now, I did say that the case with something like github is analogical, because functionally, it is like a common resource, just like how social media functions like a public square in some respects. But analogy is not univocity. Github is not strictly speaking a common good, nor is social media strictly a public square, because in both cases, a private company manages them. And typically, private goods are managed for private benefit, even if they are morally bound not to harm the common good.

That intent, that purpose, is central to determining whether something is public or private, because something public has the common benefit as its aim, while something private has private benefit as its aim.