A fiduciary steward of a ‘thing’ with rights to transfer stewardship privileges to another steward is not the same as an owner with rights to alienate a ‘thing’. Steward and owner are in different philosophical universes despite both having form in the law.
Steward is the specific sense of possessing by legitimate use that the Greeks knew. It is to manage a ‘thing’ for the good of all, society and the ‘thing’ in question. A steward is contained by law, by economics, by culture, and by morality in ways that owners are not. It is a powerful and socially appealing construct.
A fiduciary steward with a duty to maintain the value of a ‘thing’ and to try to increase that value could be a central figure in a renaissance of American society organized around limited resources with some type of open access in performance of a buy-in, financial or hereditary or customary, a commons so defined.
Why would one prefer such a system?
If you were to cast our limited physical riches as found money, as they are now, you would be solely concerned with value additions to whatever ore body is involved at minimum direct cost and maximum immediate return, a recipe for rapacious plunder.
If, however, you were to cast the ore body as a commons under the management of a fiduciary steward (a trustee would give you the flavor of the label) then the steward so obligated would maximize the amortization of the replacement cost of the resource and take into account contributory costs, environmental and otherwise, in determining a real cost accounting for purposes of calculating an ROI for any exploitation of that ore body. That would maintain maximum socioeconomic value for the ore body for its useful life, a much superior outcome.
Do Well and Be Well
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