[TeMPOraL]

> And the quotas are usually too high for political reasons, to avoid losing votes.

This is a problem with some of those quotas - they're not being set up right. That's the failure of democracy though, not of central planning per se.

> A market solution would allow a fisherman to catch below quota and be rewarded in later years by replenished stocks in the waters he controlled.

That may work, in a type of business with big inertia (i.e. where you can't go out of business over a single season), if we could parcel water like that. Sadly, fish colonies don't respect arbitrary lines we draw on maps. I don't know if such a market solution is ecologically possible; fish need space, and they often need to travel.

[koube]

Adding onto that, I can't imagine the logistical nightmare of privatizing the entire ocean including international waters, besides the root of the issue in which it solves nearly no problems.

What if I buy a 1 meter by 1 meter parcel of the ocean and charge bottom of the barrel prices to dump industrial waste in it? What if that square of ocean was 100 meters off shore from a beach in Los Angeles? If you don't want that then we're right back to government regulations.