Commons

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.

Background

The term "commons" derives from the traditional English legal term of common land, also known colloquially as "Commons". However, while common land might have been owned collectively, by a legal entity, the crown or a single person, it was subject to different forms of regulated usage, such as grazing of livestock, hunting, lopping of foliage or collecting resins. In distinction, the term commons in modern economic theory has come to refer to the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, such as air, water, and a habitable earth.

A failure (tragedy of the commons) was a widespread metaphor of early economics, which came up in the 18th centuries. Early econonomic writers and scientists were supporters of the British Agricultural Revolution and Land reform laws and were in favour of unified ownership of the land. They tried to get rid of the traditional usage rights of the commoners and used the tragedy of the commons as a suitable metaphor. They quoted, among others, Aristotle's polemic against the Polis of Platon in the sense of "everybody's property is nobody's property" and respectively "the most common good is the least guarded". The conflict around the dissolution of the traditional commons played a watershed role in landscape development and cooperative land use patterns and property rights. Among others, pamphlets as of 1833 by William Forster Lloyd on herders overusing a shared parcel of land on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze became part of the common wisdom in economics. The same concept is sometimes called the "tragedy of the fishers", because fishing too many fish before or during breeding could cause stocks to plummet.

David Cameron

David William Donald Cameron (/ˈkæmᵊrən/; born 9 October 1966) is an English politician who has served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 2010, as Leader of the Conservative Party since 2005 and as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Witney since 2001.

Cameron studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Brasenose College, Oxford. He then joined the Conservative Research Department and became special adviser, first to Norman Lamont and then to Michael Howard. He was Director of Corporate Affairs at Carlton Communications for seven years. Cameron first stood for Parliament in Stafford in 1997. He ran on a Eurosceptic platform, breaking with his party's then-policy by opposing British membership of the single European currency, and was defeated by a swing close to the national average. He was first elected to Parliament in the 2001 general election for the Oxfordshire constituency of Witney. He was promoted to the Opposition front bench two years later and rose rapidly to become head of policy co-ordination during the 2005 general election campaign. With a public image of a youthful, moderate candidate who would appeal to young voters, he won the Conservative leadership election in 2005.