There are certain goods that government can provide to people that are largely indivisible and are little consumed by each individual use. While for sure all use consumes and degrades land and infrastructure slightly, the costs are so marginal that the public benefit of providing a good to the public as a whole vastly out weights the cost of maintaining such a property.

Public lands and infrastructure are good examples of public goods. Most parkland is not extensively damaged by a few people walking on them a day or using their facilities. Lands with back-country camping are quickly healed after people leave them. Roads, within their capacity limits, are not extensively damaged by vehicular traffic. Sidewalks generally are unaffected by whether 10 or 100 people walk on them every day.

Our lives are made better by the commons. On these lands we can meet other humans, we can get from one place or another. We can experience nature. Everybody benefits from the commons, even if they do not use them regularly. Certain individuals will inevitably benefit more from the commons, but their experiences enrich the public as a whole.

The tragedy of the commons is that it has to be regulated to prevent the overuse. People will disagree on how much any particular piece of land can be utilized until it’s experience is degraded to the point where the degradation is essentially intolerable. Indeed, some of the most important public policy debates of the day involved deciding how much to limit the use of the commons.