I'm fairly left and I'm not opposed to privatization at all. But...
The highest bidder can police the fish themselves. If they fail to police the fish, their ownership is revoked and the rights are re-auctioned.
Nice in theory, but in practice the highest bidder often ends up as such a strong political lobby that it prevails on government to do the policing, fights tooth-and-nail against quotas, and rights are almost never revoked. Coming from Ireland I remember fishing lobbyists being only slightly less powerful and vocal than the farming lobby and I see no reason to think that privatization will change this - it's been the same in every other coastal region I've ever lived.
As for revocation, consider the case of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. In 1972 the US Department of the Interior bought the land the oyster farm is on and agreed a 40 year lease for the oyster farm, after which the plan was to shut everything down and let it revert to nature. Another company bought the farm in 2004, knowing full well the terms of the lease. When the lease ran out on schedule in 2012 they ran around seeking extensions via Congress and then suing the government. After having their case rejected, they're now preparing to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court. See http://www.marinij.com/ci_24909002/court-denies-drakes-bay-o...
Now, this is the opposite of your privatization scenario on its face as the government bought the land with the intent of creating a nature reserve, but it is a good example of a private actor voluntarily entering into a straightforward contractual arrangement with the government, much like the purchase of a fisheries license. 40 years is a pretty long lease period - well over a generation, more than enough time to plan for the economic dislocation of the lease expiration. But the leaseholder is fighting this like the injustice of the century, claiming that he had an expectation for lease renewal, the government is screwing him etc. Now I have no opinion about the oyster fishery itself (which I believe is well-run), nor do I think the department of the interior is necessarily great to do business with - for all I know they could have given the business owner a completely mistaken impression about the prospects of lease renewal. But the fact remains that the contractual arrangement was spelled out very clearly a long time ago, and losing your lease on a commercial property is the sort of thing that happens in business.
If a clear-cut case like this can end up dragging through the Supreme Court, I have little hope of more ambiguous and hard-to-score cases involving offshore fisheries being any better. Privatization alone is not the answer, although it is certainly a valid part of the answer. It won't work without onerous regulatory power as well.
You're totally correct that private interests can and do influence the political process!
One of the wonderful side effects of fishery privatization is the creation of a new lobby which does battle against the existing fish lobbies. See, the ultimate goal is to get less fish pulled from the ocean - at least in the short term until fish populations recover. So the fish lobbies are going to go absolutely insane! Imagine all of the out of work fishermen - and not only in Ireland, but Nigeria, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia: These are people who literally depend upon the overfishing and plundering of the ocean for their livelihoods.
These organizations (the fishermen, loosely) are already influencing the political process. They are one of the reasons why the current regulations utterly fail. [Remember: It's not as if we just noticed this overfishing problem yesterday. Governments have been trying to 'solve' this issue for decades using traditional statist regulations - and of course failing, predictably.]
We already know that privatization of food sources works in practice. All we've got to do is apply what works so incredibly well on land to the oceans.
Edit: Oh, and if the fish lobby gets the government to help with policing? That'd be great! [even if not ideal] Isn't the whole goal here to force 3rd world trawlers from pulling out too many fish? You're going to need a lot of guns to do that!
Edit2: We are completely fine with the government protecting private farms on land. What's wrong, philosophically, with government protection of private fisheries in the ocean?
We already know that privatization of food sources works in practice.
Seems like you skipped a step there. It works with quite varying degrees of success, not unlike regulation.
Edit2: We are completely fine with the government protecting private farms on land. What's wrong, philosophically, with government protection of private fisheries in the ocean?
Nothing, except not all of them are any given government's to give away (because you can fish in international waters), and because the task and costs involved are significantly different.
I'm not opposed to your idea, but you're hand-waving it as a panacea without thinking about the real issues. People have been doing this since the 1970s but we've still got a lot of problems, so it's clearly not a magic bullet. See for example http://cironline.org/reports/system-turns-us-fishing-rights-... (and no, I don't especially care about the corporations v. cottage industry frame, there's just some good summary information in the article).
1) Privatization of food sources is by far the most successful form of food production. All alternatives have provided inferior results, some catastrophically so (Cambodia under Khmer Rouge, etc. Ironically, the current international fishery management regime is not entirely unlike the collective farm practices of the Khmer Rouge!).
2) Due to the international nature of fisheries, they would have to be sold by the UN or another ad hoc international body. (The current regional-international fishery management orgs could probably work)
3) Catch shares are not related to fishery privatization. Catch shares are simply the most efficient method of carrying out traditional regulatory limits. The goal of fishery privatization is to turn around the fish population collapse, not sustain the collapse (which is what traditional regulation does).
And after the lawsuits, you may see PR companies employed to make an issue out of this before a local/state election and pressure a government to makes changes suiting the 2004 buyer.
The highest bidder can police the fish themselves. If they fail to police the fish, their ownership is revoked and the rights are re-auctioned.
Nice in theory, but in practice the highest bidder often ends up as such a strong political lobby that it prevails on government to do the policing, fights tooth-and-nail against quotas, and rights are almost never revoked. Coming from Ireland I remember fishing lobbyists being only slightly less powerful and vocal than the farming lobby and I see no reason to think that privatization will change this - it's been the same in every other coastal region I've ever lived.
As for revocation, consider the case of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. In 1972 the US Department of the Interior bought the land the oyster farm is on and agreed a 40 year lease for the oyster farm, after which the plan was to shut everything down and let it revert to nature. Another company bought the farm in 2004, knowing full well the terms of the lease. When the lease ran out on schedule in 2012 they ran around seeking extensions via Congress and then suing the government. After having their case rejected, they're now preparing to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court. See http://www.marinij.com/ci_24909002/court-denies-drakes-bay-o...
Now, this is the opposite of your privatization scenario on its face as the government bought the land with the intent of creating a nature reserve, but it is a good example of a private actor voluntarily entering into a straightforward contractual arrangement with the government, much like the purchase of a fisheries license. 40 years is a pretty long lease period - well over a generation, more than enough time to plan for the economic dislocation of the lease expiration. But the leaseholder is fighting this like the injustice of the century, claiming that he had an expectation for lease renewal, the government is screwing him etc. Now I have no opinion about the oyster fishery itself (which I believe is well-run), nor do I think the department of the interior is necessarily great to do business with - for all I know they could have given the business owner a completely mistaken impression about the prospects of lease renewal. But the fact remains that the contractual arrangement was spelled out very clearly a long time ago, and losing your lease on a commercial property is the sort of thing that happens in business.
If a clear-cut case like this can end up dragging through the Supreme Court, I have little hope of more ambiguous and hard-to-score cases involving offshore fisheries being any better. Privatization alone is not the answer, although it is certainly a valid part of the answer. It won't work without onerous regulatory power as well.