Stossel's column today is required reading if you believe "Government-imposed regulation" is completely different than the rules of behavior needed for managing some resources (among other things) by those involved.
She writes in her 1990 book, "Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action," that there is no shortage of real-world examples of "a self-governed common-property arrangement in which the rules have been devised and modified by the participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by them."
In other words, free people work things out on their own.
Not only is government help often not needed, Ostrom says it usually screws things up because bureaucrats operate in an ivory tower ignorant of the local customs and the specific resource.
Political theorists assume away the problems of political control, but the problems are real. There is no reason to believe that bureaucrats and politicians, no matter how well meaning, are better at solving problems than the people on the spot, who have the strongest incentive to get the solution right. Unlike bureaucrats, they bear the costs of their mistakes. Moreover, as the prize committee pointed out, "Rules that are imposed from the outside or unilaterally dictated by powerful insiders have less legitimacy and are more likely to be violated."
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UPDATE: I have just one question. Is this the Nobel committee made up of the same bozos that chose BarryO for the Peace Prize? If so, does the rest of the country know they've got Multiple Personality Syndrome?
