In most societies individual private ownership of natural resources such as minerals, forests, and fisheries is rare. Unless regulated, open-access conditions will result in overuse of a resource relative to what would prevail under private ownership. Regulation of the commons faces two challenges: (1) the prevention of overuse and (2) exploitation of the resource in the least costly manner. The following essay by Robert Higgs analyzes the causes and consequences of the regulations restricting the catch of salmon in the Pacific Northwest. For the most part the focus is on the costs of regulation rather than on the issue of preventing overuse. Higgs argues that because of the anadromous nature of salmon, the least costly means of catch is the use of upstream techniques or traps at the mouths of rivers, yet legislators have generally outlawed the highly successful catch techniques. The result of the regulations, according to Higgs, is technical regress; we now harvest fewer salmon with more inputs than we did before the regulations were instituted.

Higgs's essay is rich in historical detail. As in the essay by Krueger (Chapter 5), without such historical knowledge the dynamics of regulation would be difficult to understand. For example, sport fishermen today are among the important players in the policy arena and were not a potent force when the original legislation was put in place. It is not reasonable to assume that the original designers could have foreseen the future role of sport fishermen.