For decades, the nation’s fisheries have been regulated and controlled by the federal government. Because the oceans are “common property”, fish populations have been depleted because each individual had an incentive to maximize today’s catch. This is the “tragedy of the commons”–when a value is owned communally, nobody takes care of it and protects its long-term value. The value is quickly used up or falls into disrepair. Privatizing any communal property eliminates this problem because the owner has an interest in preserving the value over the long term.
The oceans are much like a wild berry patch or orchard. The plants produce fruit with no effort from man, but the individual who picks the fruit–or catches the fish–owns the product of his labor. But he does not own the source of that fruit. However, if he begins to prune the plants, provide them fertilizer and water, and take other actions to increase their productivity, he has given more value to those plants and has a rightful claim of ownership. The same applies to the oceans.
The individual who increases the productivity of the oceans has a moral right to the products of his efforts–he has a moral right to the increased value he has created. Congress has a legitimate role to play in this–it must establish objective criteria by which this right is recognized and protected.
In the case of a fish farm, this is relatively easy. The farmer who places a mesh cage in the ocean, fills it with fish, and raises those fish to maturity has a right to those fish. He has a rightful claim to the area of the ocean he is utilizing–he has given that area greater value than it previously held. There are certainly other issues to be considered and addressed, such as the status of an area that has been abandoned, how property rights need to be claimed and documented, etc.
This is essentially the process by which property rights were assigned in the west. The Homestead Act established the criteria that had to be met in order for an individual to claim ownership of the land– he had to make improvements and occupy the land for a specific period of time.
The same principle should be applied to the oceans and other waterways. The results will be cleaner water and more abundant fish populations. (For a more thorough analysis of this issue, see my article “The Practicality of Private Waterways.”