The Tomales Bay Institute

Another interesting initiative from Marin County:

THE TOMALES BAY INSTITUTE

WHO WE ARE

The Tomales Bay Institute was founded in 2001 by a group of outside-the-box thinkers seeking to expand the scope of the possible in American politics and policy. We are located in Point Reyes Station, California, and affiliated with Earth Island Institute and the Mesa Refuge.

WHAT WE BELIEVE

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else." - John Maynard Keynes

For too long, the possibilities for change in America have been confined within a very narrow conceptual box. Inside this box there exist only two arenas of activity: the market and the state. Almost always, the market is seen as the best way to get things done - it is more efficient, fair and even democratic than the state. The state's primary job is to protect and expand individual and, above all, corporate property rights.

Within this box, the default solutions to almost every social and environmental problem are privatization, deregulation and tax reduction. To the extent there are alternatives, they invariably require increased taxation, government spending and regulation.

We believe it's time for America to break out of this conceptual box. To do this we need an expanded intellectual framework. The major defect of the prevailing conceptual box is that it misses an entire realm of human and natural activity. We call this missing realm the commons.

OUR MISSION

The mission of the Tomales Bay Institute is to develop an intellectual framework that includes the commons as well as the market and the state, and to inject that expanded framework into America's vision of possibilities.

Our long-term objective is to leverage system-wide change by creating an easy-to-grasp intellectual framework that inexorably leads to such change.