Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right

A lecture, not a book — the Twenty-Third Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture, delivered in October 2003 and published by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Barnes, an entrepreneur who co-founded Working Assets, defines the commons as “the sum of all we inherit together and must pass on, undiminished and more or less equally, to our heirs”: watersheds, air, radio spectrum, the genome, main streets, political systems. His argument is that capitalism’s environmental and distributive failures follow from the commons having no legal standing — corporations hold property rights and the commons does not, which he calls the modern version of divine right. The proposal is institutional rather than regulatory: chartered commons trusts with property rights equal to a corporation’s, empowered to cap extraction, charge polluters for use, and pay per-capita dividends to all citizens.

Why it’s on the list: It closes McCord’s Institutions, Property Rights, and the Law section, after De Soto’s “The Mystery of Capital” — the section’s last word, and the entry that pushes hardest on the question of who holds title to what nobody made.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the Political Economy part, section Institutions, Property Rights, and the Law — a structured curriculum shared on X on March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Commons — the category the lecture is arguing has no legal standing.
• Tragedy of the Commons — the problem Barnes proposes trusts to solve, and the framing Elinor Ostrom’s work in McCord’s next section complicates.
• Externalities — the harm the proposed charge on polluters would price.
• Capitalism — the system the lecture is trying to repair rather than replace.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.