Utterly fascinating article appears in today's WSJ. It's got all the stuff of intense docudrama: mass violence, innocent victims, caring neighbors, perverse tax policy, actual poverty, and a greed that you know is there but are reluctant to call out. It's the dirty-details real-life stuff -- not the paint-by-numbers morality plays they show in pop culture news shows.

So as I drove to Home Depot today to buy dirt (there's an economics lesson somehwere in that statement) I was thinking about what they call the Tragedy of the Commons: how assets held for the "public good" are always gamed and wasted and ultimate do no good to anyone, let alone the public.

Which made me think of communism. Not in the normal sense of my taxes going up. Again. Like they do every year. Despite the nonsense I hear on television. But communism as a system of control over a unit of society. I decided that I was aware of only one well-functioning communist totalitarianism, and that would be my own household. All assets are held for the benefit of all, with all wealth ruthlessly redistributed, and everyone compelled to contribute in their own way.

Okay, we still have our power struggles. Like Alane walking into my man-cave to look over my shoulder while I type this -- as party leader I get more private space than the nomenklatura. (While our simian prole offspring duke it out in general population.)

And just like the real life commies we also have our dialectic paradoxes. So for instance, when I tell the boys, "your behavior is inappropriate," it will not suffice for them to reply, "I will not be repressed by your normative absolutes." No, son, you will be repressed. Because without repression communism cannot operate.

It's a harsh regime, but I see my neighbors run their house pretty much the same way. We respect each other for that -- but I don't think it has ever occurred to us to pool resources and try to run the two households (much less the whole neighborhood) in that collective model. (Here I'm picturing us barging into the home down the street and announcing that due to the relative size of their large-screen television, their household will also now be made part of our collective.)

Which thoughts swung my flightful mind back to the tragedy of the commons and the onerous tax bills that sap the funds from Cookie and Mojo's college funds. Meh, maybe by then I will have come up with a get-rich scam that swindles the masses and makes me wealthy enough to not care whether a working stiff can make it on his own.

But back to the WSJ article. It's all about the victim relief fund set up after a horrible shooting -- and the contentious fight that ensued over the size of the share distributed to each victim. Human nature and group dynamics being what they are, this stuff is inevitable. And as any thoughtful lawyer knows, the messiness of it all can almost never be resolved with a straightforward appeal to bright-line rules. But without bright-line rules the process will bend, as it must, to popular sentiments making outcomes variable (to put it nicely).

Is that justice? Is it even charity when it's done this way? Or does it not matter because the only reason we make donations is to make ourselves feel better -- tell ourselves we improved the plight of far-off victims, even though all we did was cast crumbs before them. Inviting a competition for a finite resource. Empowering a special master whose work will require a thick skin, an aversion to temptation, and superhuman wisdom.

Which makes me think again of taxes and all the crazy schemes aspiring to the ill-defined concept of "social justice." It's bad enough to consider all those competing for the scarce proceeds; worse to see all those grabby climbers asserting roles as special masters; worst is thinking through the cost to non-subjective justice.

Meh, at least people feel better.