Realist Property Rights, From the Rec Room to Mars

My apartment building is tumbling towards a legitimacy crisis. Recriminations are flying, coalitions forming, battle lines being drawn. The question is: who rules the rec room?

I live in a new building with extensive common areas. Pool tables, TVs, conference rooms, an outdoor theater, etc. A few months after everyone moved in, our manager sent us an email: from now on, we can reserve these areas for parties. Great! Also, you have to pay.

This caused some grumbling. It’s a common area! Didn’t we already pay for this?

Fortunately, there was a solution. Sort of. The building has an active Facebook group, and one of the organizers created a Google Calendar-based system for informally reserving rooms. Don’t pay up, just put your name down.

This is great, except that we now have two property rights systems: an informal, zero-cost one, and a formal, costly one. And not everyone knows about the informal one, so people are starting to worry that high-demand real estate will be double-sold on Friday nights. (So far, there haven’t been any serious issues, but Summer is Coming.)

Oops.

This situation is pretty much what Hobbes was getting at. If you have an informal system for adjudicating disputes, you need some higher authority who can resolve conflict and tell people to knock it off. In Hobbes’ case, the guy in charge had cannons. In this case, he just has our security deposits. As everyone learns sooner or…