The Daily News opinion piece reflect the delusional perspective that if only we fix the environmental problems and make the pie bigger, we wouldn't have to have these allocation fights. Might sound nice, but it ain't real. The pie can be made bigger, but only slightly bigger, and never big enough to satiate an ever-increasing human population. Any realistic analysis recognizes that just like every other natural resource on the planet, it comes down to ever more people fighting over fewer remaining scraps. That's natural and logical. I cringe that so many don't understand it.

The supply of salmon is limited. It's been limited for over a century, and is only going to be more limited in years to come. An intelligent society would allocate any surplus production to the highest and best use, generally defined as greatest economic good and or providing the greatest good to the greatest number.

Reserving any surplus salmon in Gray's Harbor to less than two dozen non-treaty gillnetters at the expense of a more socially and economically beneficial recreational fishery when there is a federally protected treaty gillnet fishery to more than fulfill market place salmon needs is batshit crazy by any rational analysis. The existing economic benefit to a few non-treaty gillnetters is not an entitlement to the public resource. I don't understand why Dogfish defends their interest unless they are relatives or they owe his bank money. Businesses fail and succeed all the time. The same Dogfish that opposed the bail out of banks deemed "too big to fail" thinks it makes sense to publicly subsidize a gillnet fishery that has outlived its utility. I'm not understanding this.

I wonder how Blake would react to a bill drafted to ease, but not eliminate, the pain to his publicly subsidized gillnetters.

I'm not opposed to commercial fishing. I'm not even opposed to gillnet fishing. I am opposed to allocating public trust resources to low value outcomes when higher value alternatives are available.

Sg