History offers us a brutal lesson: collective property ownership collapsed twice in early 17th century America. Not because the idea was inherently flawed on paper, but because it clashed directly with how humans actually behave.

When you remove individual accountability and personal stakes, motivation evaporates. People stop working hard. They stop innovating. They stop caring about the collective outcome because there's no direct reward for their effort.

This wasn't unique to that era. The same pattern repeats whenever ownership is diffused too widely without proper incentive alignment. Everyone's responsible means nobody's responsible.

It's a timeless problem in system design: how do you create mechanisms that align individual motivation with collective benefit? History suggests that without skin in the game, even the best intentions crumble.