Rent requires scarcity. A good freely available to all who need it commands no price and yields no rent; only when access is restricted does it acquire exchange value. So whoever would draw rent from a commons must first manufacture the scarcity that makes it pay. Enclosure is that manufacture: it does not find a scarce asset and charge for it, it creates the scarcity by gating what was open.
This is the paradox James Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, set out in 1804: private riches grow as public wealth is destroyed.Maitland, eighth Earl of Lauderdale. The inverse relation between public wealth (use value, requiring abundance) and private riches (exchange value, requiring scarcity) is now usually called the Lauderdale Paradox, revived by Foster & Clark (2009). Public wealth is the sum of things useful and abundant; private riches the sum of things useful and scarce, counted in exchange value. The two move in opposite directions, so increasing private riches means diminishing the common stock – destroying abundance to create (exchange) value.
Lauderdale’s own illustration was water: a spring in a well-watered country earns its owner nothing, since everyone can drink freely; close off the other sources and the now-scarce spring can be charged for. The destruction of abundance is the creation of private wealth. Enclosure is the same act in slower motion – the abundance of the commons withdrawn so that access can be sold back.
The pattern is scale-free, and its sharpest case is the intangible commons: a digital good is non-rival and endlessly copyable – abundant by nature, scarce only by contrivance. Closed weights, DRM, paywalls and licences are scarcity-manufacturing devices laid over a good with no natural scarcity at all. Where the good is infinitely copyable, the rent is purely a tax on an artificial enclosure.
References
- Lauderdale (1804), An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth.
- Foster & Clark (2009), “The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction”, Monthly Review 61(6).