left: entrepreneur, ambitious, hustle culture. right: lazy, complacent, provides no benefit to society

The so-called tragedy of the commons is bullshit. It's a just so story invented by capitalist economists to justify governments seizing land and other resources and selling them to private owners.

I mean, look at your own link. The modern conception of the tragedy of the commons was written up by a guy who looked at a common pasture and thought "if everybody put more cows on that pasture than they were allowed by custom, the pasture would be overgrazed". Which is trivially true. The fact that, in hundreds of years, that pasture had not been overgrazed, because herders did the right thing and shared the pasture with one another according to longstanding custom, did not occur to him.

The tragedy of the commons only occurs when people become stupid, selfish, or desperate, and ignore or forget the existing rules governing use of the commons. People have managed common land without overusing it for, quite literally, all of human history. But when times of crisis come and the cultural norms that governed the common land break down, we see people taking everything they can for themselves.

And capitalism is just such a crisis. It's a mind virus. It takes perfectly normal people, with natural instincts to cooperate and help one another, and turns them into cancer cells only interested in maximizing their personal profit at the expense of everyone and everything around them.

See: the person on the left.

The tragedy of the commons is a tragedy of capitalism. Sane people don't behave that way.

The tragedy of the commons is such an important lesson. It teaches us that we should beat capitalists with baseball bats until they stop hoarding wealth.