EDWIN REQENA

Central planning destroys the Earth and everything beautiful about it. Between 1948 and 1973, the Soviet Union slaughtered 180,000 whales in the Southern Ocean alone, often falsifying the catch numbers they reported to the International Whaling Commission. Soviet ships hunted species already near commercial extinction: humpbacks, blues, fins, and even orcas. They killed them at a staggering loss, processed them inefficiently, and dumped enormous quantities of oil and meat that exceeded any plausible domestic demand. The operation was economically irrational by any measure. Which is exactly what you should expect. No Soviet whaling captain owned the vessel or the whales. No bureaucrat in Moscow bore the cost of depleting the stock. The entire operation ran on state quotas, state ships, and state salaries. Property rights price scarcity into human decisions. Strip them away, and you strip away the signal that tells fishermen, farmers, and whalers when to stop. The incentive structure pointed in exactly one direction: maximize tonnage to hit the plan numbers, regardless of long-run consequences. Private whalers operating in a system of enforceable property rights face a brutal disciplining mechanism: overfish, and you destroy your own future revenue. The Soviet state answered to a five-year plan, not profit and loss. Garrett Hardin called this the tragedy of the commons. The Soviets ran that tragedy at industrial scale, with military logistics, for three decades. Hundreds of thousands of whales paid the price.