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All the talk about rights-based fishing and IFQs is a red herring that throws all of us off the track of what is important. IFQs do not work because they are rights, or because they are property rights…. IFQs work because they involve an assigned catch, as opposed to having catch be determined competitively. (Vermont Law Review, Spring 2004, p. 659) It is apparently irresistible for people, even trained scientists, to misunderstand ITQs as a triumph of the market and privatization. ITQs play into the grand narrative that private property rights promote good stewardship of a resource. Remember the so-called "tragedy of the commons" story? That parable holds that if you give people private property rights in the commons - if only your privatize the collective resource! - people won't over-exploit it. "Tragedy" can be averted. The mythology insists that the commons can be responsibly managed only if it is duly privatized.

"The real problem is that the State and Market are locked in a symbiotic alliance to the detriment of the commons. This unholy alliance so tenacious because it is embedded in our very phenomenological understanding of life, writes Mattei. We perceive the world as a mechanistic system in which subject and object are separate and distinct, and we supposedly have individual autonomy to do what we wish to act upon the world. As subjects, we tend to pracel out and commodify the world into units that are isolated from the larger whole; thus we see humanity as separate from Nature and the various elements of it (wetlands, atmosphere, genes) as isolated objects. "