Thank God for state intervention protecting and regulating our land

[adanthar]

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Borodog,

At what $/barrel price point would a corporation owning the ANWR, in your opinion, have decided to drill it for oil?

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I haven't the foggiest.

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Would a private corporation have decided to drill it for oil prior to the close of today's market price?

[Borodog]

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Borodog,

At what $/barrel price point would a corporation owning the ANWR, in your opinion, have decided to drill it for oil?

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I haven't the foggiest.

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Would a private corporation have decided to drill it for oil prior to the close of today's market price?

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I haven't the foggiest. That's what businessmen are for.

What's the point?

[adanthar]

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Borodog,

At what $/barrel price point would a corporation owning the ANWR, in your opinion, have decided to drill it for oil?

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I haven't the foggiest.

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Would a private corporation have decided to drill it for oil prior to the close of today's market price?

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I haven't the foggiest. That's what businessmen are for.

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Since various businessmen have been lobbying Congress to open ANWR for drilling for the last two decades or so, I'll go ahead and assume that a private corporation would have drilled ANWR by now. Does that sound like a fair assumption?

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What's the point?

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The fact that there's even still a debate about drilling in the ANWR seems to suggest that that [political incentive to preserve land] is incredibly strong. (In that particular example, it might even be too strong. Your point, however, has consistently been that it practically doesn't exist, not that it's overwhelming.)

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[pvn]

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Borodog,

At what $/barrel price point would a corporation owning the ANWR, in your opinion, have decided to drill it for oil?

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I haven't the foggiest.

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Would a private corporation have decided to drill it for oil prior to the close of today's market price?

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I haven't the foggiest. That's what businessmen are for.

What's the point?

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I'll go ahead and get to the punchline. He's going to do some sort of cost/benefit "scorecard" that shows that there's money to be made by blowing the earth up and getting the iron out of the core for scrap. But it will leave out a crucial piece of information - the VALUE to the OWNER of leaving the resource INTACT.

It's like we get into a discussion about chopping cars. Let's say a guy who owns a parking lot lets me have access to the cars that are parked there in his trust, and he'll let me take the rims, radios, etc. But he won't let me take the entire car (if entire cars disappear his customers might start to suspect something). Now, I run some cost/benefit analysis, and it's clearly beneficial *to me* to "pillage" the cars. From this, we can obviously conclude that people everywhere will be tearing their OWN cars apart, right?

[adanthar]

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I'll go ahead and get to the punchline. He's going to do some sort of cost/benefit "scorecard" that shows that there's money to be made by blowing the earth up and getting the iron out of the core for scrap. But it will leave out a crucial piece of information - the VALUE to the OWNER of leaving the resource INTACT.

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What's the corporate value of leaving the ANWR intact?

[Borodog]

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Borodog,

At what $/barrel price point would a corporation owning the ANWR, in your opinion, have decided to drill it for oil?

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I haven't the foggiest.

[/ QUOTE ]

Would a private corporation have decided to drill it for oil prior to the close of today's market price?

[/ QUOTE ]

I haven't the foggiest. That's what businessmen are for.

[/ QUOTE ]

Since various businessmen have been lobbying Congress to open ANWR for drilling for the last two decades or so, I'll go ahead and assume that a private corporation would have drilled ANWR by now. Does that sound like a fair assumption?

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I have no idea what the situation would be in the absence of government ownership of the land. It's an impossible counterfactual. I also don't know the details of what the agreement would be whereby the government would open up this land for private exploitation. Given the incestuous history of corporate-government arrangements, my strong suspicion is that the drilling would be heavily subsidized by government.

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What's the point?

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The fact that there's even still a debate about drilling in the ANWR seems to suggest that that [political incentive to preserve land] is incredibly strong. (In that particular example, it might even be too strong. Your point, however, has consistently been that it practically doesn't exist, not that it's overwhelming.)

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A) Why are you ignoring mountains of empirical evidence and virtually my entire theoretical argument for this obtuse point about ANWR? One case, regardless of whether it actually shows what you think it does, does not belie the vast majority of the history of government land management.

B) Didn't you already admit that at sufficient price access will inevitably be bought? So you're just haggling about the price at which the resource will be destroyed? And this is supposed to be some sort of argument in favor of government ownership?

C) Why did you switch from Yellowstone, where the highest and best use is clearly as a park, to ANWR, where the highest and best use might not be? If the highest and best use of ANWR is actually to drill oil, who are you and your coercive government to deprive the mass of the consuming public of the highest and best use of that resource? Not to mention that exploitation of oil resources needn't destroy the value as a wildlife preserve, as is demonstrated by the Audobon Society case I quoted above.

[tolbiny]

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This is the thing that your rhetoric masks - any private ownership of land is "forcible exclusion of the majority of people". Government ownership just attempts to do it in the public interest. I can visit the wonder of Yellowstone any time I like without being subject to arbitrary whims and fees of an individual

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This is what is so amusing about you Phil, how you manage to display your ignorance so gracefully. If you knew anything about the history of Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon, or anyone of a number of national parks in the US. Did you know that there actually was a time when these areas of land were designated national parks AND people really could walk about the freely without fees or whims of individuals running them? Perhaps if you did you would know that the government spent tens of millions of dollars cleaning up the parks because they were trashed. Trails were worn down to bedrock which is both dangerous for the hiker as rocks are slippery, but further increases the rate of erosion. Animals were hunted out of the park (wolves, grizzles, elk) because the government paid no attention to their numbers. Trash and litter were spread quite liberally throughout the parks because there were no rangers, or trashcans or signs gently asking people to remove it from the park. It is hilarious that you post this crap when in actual fact that it was only when the government started limiting visitors and charging fees that these conditions improved. It is only when they stopped things like this "I can visit the wonder of Yellowstone any time I like without being subject to arbitrary whims and fees of an individual" that the very things you are so concerned with stopped occurring. But what is most amusing is the fact that there are probably dozens to hundreds of books on the history of the Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone which dedicate many words describing these very facts.

[Borodog]

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I'll go ahead and get to the punchline. He's going to do some sort of cost/benefit "scorecard" that shows that there's money to be made by blowing the earth up and getting the iron out of the core for scrap. But it will leave out a crucial piece of information - the VALUE to the OWNER of leaving the resource INTACT.

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What's the corporate value of leaving the ANWR intact?

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The Pretense of Knowledge.

[adanthar]

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I have no idea what the situation would be in the absence of government ownership of the land. It's an impossible counterfactual. I also don't know the details of what the agreement would be whereby the government would open up this land for private exploitation. Given the incestuous history of corporate-government arrangements, my strong suspicion is that the drilling would be heavily subsidized by government.

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In other words, it's fine for me to make a giant assumption for the sake of argument that "state ownership and private ownership is largely indistinguishable", but for you to concede that a corporation would probably have drilled in ANWR by now is an impossible counterfactual.

You know, it doesn't work both ways. You don't get to pretend to be extremely knowledgeable on economic theory and then feign ignorance on whether you can even assume that a corporation that's been lobbying to drill an area for oil since the 1970's would want to, err, drill the area for oil.

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A) Why are you ignoring mountains of empirical evidence and virtually my entire theoretical argument for this obtuse point about ANWR? One case, regardless of whether it actually shows what you think it does, does not belie the vast majority of the history of government land management.

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What history would that be? We both know land management, except in the most primitive sense, hasn't even been a twinkle in the public consciousness until around 1900. Since that point, and especially since 1950, I submit that the American government has actually managed the environment pretty well. Corporate management of the land...not so much. Even those well maintained forests you've been mentioning so much have been brought about through government incentives, if not outright, umm, force.

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B) Didn't you already admit that at sufficient price access will inevitably be bought? So you're just haggling about the price at which the resource will be destroyed? And this is supposed to be some sort of argument in favor of government ownership?

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You keep saying that government has no incentive to maintain public land. Clearly, sufficient incentive in the other direction means that land won't be maintained - everything has a price. That doesn't matter, though, because your argument is that the governmental incentive is weak or nonexistent compared to corporate incentives. Well, ANWR is as a slam dunk case as it gets for the opposite conclusion. Yellowstone is also a slam dunk - for example, there's gold in thar hills - but it's not as well known.

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C) Why did you switch from Yellowstone, where the highest and best use is clearly as a park, to ANWR, where the highest and best use might not be? If the highest and best use of ANWR is actually to drill oil, who are you and your coercive government to deprive the mass of the consuming public of the highest and best use of that resource?

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Again, you don't get to have it both ways. Either governmental incentives to protect the environment are always too low/nonexistent compared to the market's, or they're not. Which is it?

[vhawk01]

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I'll go ahead and get to the punchline. He's going to do some sort of cost/benefit "scorecard" that shows that there's money to be made by blowing the earth up and getting the iron out of the core for scrap. But it will leave out a crucial piece of information - the VALUE to the OWNER of leaving the resource INTACT.

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What's the corporate value of leaving the ANWR intact?

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They will have it tomorrow?