Thank God for state intervention protecting and regulating our land

[pvn]

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A golden goose that has $10,000,000 inside of it thats only paying $52,000 interest a year won't survive because its foolish to keep it alive.

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Exactly, actually if you factor in the worth of money in hands of a capable entrepreneur, and the cheapness/abundance of land, and uncertainty about the future value of various items, the ratio of long term wealth to immediate wealth makes it an economic slam dunk to pillage the land - at least form the individual's perspective.

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But your argument is that the goose, even though it's worth more dead than alive, shouldn't be "pillaged". Please explain why.

[iron81]

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But your argument is that the goose, even though it's worth more dead than alive, shouldn't be "pillaged". Please explain why.

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[adanthar]

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But your argument is that the goose, even though it's worth more dead than alive, shouldn't be "pillaged". Please explain why.

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Remember when I said that AC as a philosophy appears to take an almost sociopathic view of life as a game you play with money as a scoresheet?

Good times.

[Borodog]

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The entire point of the argument is that government ownership of land is exactly like the private ownership of land that you hate so much, with the sole difference that private owners are interested in preserving the capital value of the land whereas those in government do not.

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It's good that you say this because this is the point at which we disagree. I and others do not think that private owners are interested in the preserving the long term capital of certain types of goods and land.

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This flies in the face of common sense and hundreds of years of long-settled economic theory. Owners have no interest in the value of their capital?

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I think the Amazon (and yes, guaranteed ownership does indeed exist there, very similar to an AC system, in fact) makes that a slam dunk win for me.

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Lol! You mean the same Amazon where the government is taking the land away from the natives and giving it to timber companies and subsidizing slash and burn agriculture and colonization? What a slam dunk!

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I also think that markets fail when confronted with ecosystems that require preservation. But this requires a well referenced argument to make a case, which I don't have time for immediately.

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You simply assume that governments will preserve lands and grant you access while assuming that private owners are morons who will destroy the goose that lays the golden eggs. I.e., you assume your entire argument.

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Are you familiar with the golden goose story? This is actually a good analogy for the preservation vs plunder situation. You have a goose that lives forever, and lays a golden egg a week, worth $1000. Or, you can kill the goose and retrieve a diamond egg from its belly, worth $10,000,000. Put 1000 of these in the hands of private owners. What percentage of golden geese still exist after a year? After 10 years? After a century? I think not many.

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Argument by mythical creatures and made up numbers.

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The fact is that the immediate economic value of many types of land is very low when preserved. For example, companies clear fell large areas of land they actually own, despite huge amounts of evidence that such activities are less profitable and far worse environmentally in the long run compared to managed extraction. WHY??? The answer is because the owners of these businesses want to be wealthy, NOW. Not in 50 years time. And when land is cheap, as it is in many places, exploiting large areas of it quickly is the best way to make a fortune and hurt your competitor. Your theory of private rationality fails miserably in this regard, or at least, fails to take into account people's massive preference for quick profit over very long term gain. And in fact, the market selects for these kind of people by giving them wealth, and makes them land owners in the short term (under a century). This is the core of the reason why capitalism fails dismally at protecting land.

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Support any of this. It is complete and total bunk.

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Further to this, the timber industry is an excellent example of governments doing a better job than private businesses at preservation. Governments generally preserve state forests for managed timber extraction and other uses (at least, they do in Australia); they rarely clear fell any area. This is in spite of the disincentives you claim politicians have.

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Again. Support any of this. The record of public vs. private land conservation is clear.

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The federal government owns approximately one third of the land in the United States, and its land policies in the West, where most of its property is located, have led to the steady deterioration of the land and its wildlife . . . The quality of management of private lands in contrast to that of public lands—whether federal, state or local—bears this out: There are few if any clear-cutting, depletion, or soil erosion problems on Boise Cascade’s properties or other private forests. There are few if any overgrazing problems on private ranches. And there is far less poaching on private lands than in public parks.
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Those close to the land—whether in a commercial sense or even in terms of a cause—are far better stewards than bureaucrats, whose management of the “commons” ensures abuse since they possess few incentives to protect the land. Since their revenues are extracted from the citizenry by the force of taxation, bureaucratic managers have no way of telling whether they administrate resources in ways beneficial to the public or not.
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Where in a market economy, disenchanted consumers are free to shop elsewhere, no such opportunity exists under the domain of a bureaucracy with monopoly powers.
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Guaranteed revenues almost regardless of how they perform, bureaucrats actually have every incentive to mismanage resources in order to justify their jobs and their agency’s ever expanded existence. Even If bureaucrats were angels with perfect ambitions to do only good, the dilemma of their ignorance in being shielded from the verdict of customers (the citizenry), prevents them from acting in ways to protect and enhance resources.
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In contrast, the quality of land management for wildlife by privatizing federal lands is well illustrated by hundreds of successful private preserves operated throughout the United States, many of which help boost the populations of threatened and endangered species.
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For example, the Audubon Society’s Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary in Vermilion Pariah, La., owns and carefully manages the land for wildlife and for oil production. In order to maximize its value, the Audubon Society carefully investigated and weighed the use of its land and discovered that there is no necessary conflict between the pursuit of both economic and environmental goals.
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The Nature Conservancy, another major environmental group, similarly accomplishes many of its goals—setting aside land for species—very effectively by buying property and keeping it out of the hands of the government . . .
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On privatized lands, ranchers, and mining lumber concerns would be forced to consider not just grazing, extraction and harvesting (now at low costs), but reforestation, remediation, and land rotation if they wanted to remain profitable in the future.
-- David J. Theroux, Independence Institute

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I could go on for dozens of pages citing government created tragedies of the commons:

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One example has been timber resources. In the American West and in Canada, most of the forests are owned, not by private owners but by the federal (or provincial) government. The government then leases their use to private timber companies. In short, private property is per*mitted only in the annual use of the resource, but not in the forest, the resource, itself. In this situation, the private timber company does not own the capital value, and therefore does not have to worry about depletion of the resource itself. The timber company has no economic incentive to conserve the resource, replant trees, etc. Its only incentive is to cut as many trees as quickly as possible, since there is no economic value to the timber company in maintaining the capital value of the forest. In Europe, where private ownership of forests is far more com*mon, there is little complaint of destruction of timber resources. For wherever private property is allowed in the forest itself, it is to the benefit of the owner to preserve and restore tree growth while he is cutting timber, so as to avoid depletion of the forest's capital value.8
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Thus, in the United States, a major culprit has been the Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which owns forests and leases annual rights to cut timber, with resulting devastation of the trees. In contrast, private forests such as those owned by large lumber firms like Georgia-Pacific and U.S. Plywood scientifically cut and reforest their trees in order to maintain their future supply.9
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Another unhappy consequence of the American government's failure to allow private property in a resource was the destruction of the West*ern grasslands in the late nineteenth century. Every viewer of "Western" movies is familiar with the mystique of the "open range and the often violent "wars" among cattlemen, sheepmen, and farmers over parcels of ranch land. The "open range" was the failure of the federal govern*ment to apply the policy of homesteading to the changed conditions of the drier climate west of the Mississippi. In the East, the 160 acres granted free to homesteading farmers on government land constituted a viable technological unit for farming in a wetter climate. But in the dry climate of the West, no successful cattle or sheep ranch could be organized on a mere 160 acres. But the federal government refused to expand the 160-acre unit to allow the "homesteading" of larger cattle ranches. Hence, the "open range," on which private cattle and sheep owners were able to roam unchecked on government-owned pasture land. But this meant that no one owned the pasture, the land itself; it was therefore to the economic advantage of every cattle or sheep owner to graze the land and use up the grass as quickly as possible, otherwise the grass would be grazed by some other sheep or cattle owner. The result of this tragically shortsighted refusal to allow private property in grazing land itself was an overgrazing of the land, the ruining of the grassland by grazing too early in the season, and the failure of anyone to restore or replant the grass?anyone who bothered to restore the grass would have had to look on helplessly while someone else grazed his cattle or sheep. Hence the overgrazing of the West, and the onset of the "dust bowl." Hence also the illegal attempts by numerous cattle*men, farmers, and sheepmen to take the law into their own hands and fence off the land into private property?and the range wars that often followed.
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Professor Samuel P. Hays, in his authoritative account of the conserva*tion movement in America, writes of the range problem:
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Much of the Western livestock industry depended for its forage upon the "open" range, owned by the federal government, but free for anyone to use?. Con*gress had never provided legislation regulating grazing or permitting stockmen to acquire range lands. Cattle and sheepmen roamed the public domain?. Cattlemen fenced range for their exclusive use, but competitors cut the wire. Resorting to force and violence, sheepherders and cowboys "solved" their dis*putes over grazing lands by slaughtering rival livestock and murdering rival stockmen?. Absence of the most elementary institutions of property law created confusion, bitterness, and destruction.
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Amid this turmoil the public range rapidly deteriorated. Originally plentiful and lush, the forage supply was subjected to intense pressure by increasing use?. The public domain became stocked with more animals than the range could support. Since each stockman feared that others would beat him to the available forage, he grazed early in the year and did not permit the young grass to mature and reseed. Under such conditions the quality and quantity of available forage rapidly decreased; vigorous perennials gave way to annuals and annuals to weeds.10

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Hays concludes that public-domain range lands may have been depleted by over two-thirds by this process, as compared to their virgin condition.
-- Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty


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How about I go into how ocean fish stocks are being "protected" into oblivion by the tragedy of the commons that results from governments refusing to allow property rights to develop in ocean fisheries? Or how African countries that tried to protect elephants as public resources saw their populations decimated but nations that simply gave the elephants to the local tribes to do with as they saw fit saw their populations steadily increase? Given that even poor, ignorant African tribesman were apparently smart enough to care about their long term capital value, doesn't that tend to belie your "all non-bureaucrats are short-sighted nimrods" theory?

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So I think your case is weak. There are many more points to add to the one above, and I agree that more rigor is required to fully debunk it.

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I don't think your moronic-private-owner/angelic-bureaucrat theory is going to be debunking anything.

[TomCollins]

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A golden goose that has $10,000,000 inside of it thats only paying $52,000 interest a year won't survive because its foolish to keep it alive.

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Exactly, actually if you factor in the worth of money in hands of a capable entrepreneur, and the cheapness/abundance of land, and uncertainty about the future value of various items, the ratio of long term wealth to immediate wealth makes it an economic slam dunk to pillage the land - at least form the individual's perspective.

One of the other problem is that long term consequences are uncertain and that avenues of wealth are unrealized. For example, 30 years ago the value of ecotourism was not considered. Now, people with fragments of the remaining wilderness in various areas can make good money, and this value will only increase with time. But the guys who felled the last 1/4 or so only looked at the value of the land at the moment - they simply didn't know any better, or didn't care about the value of something in 20 years time. This is the myopia of capitalism and private ownership. Another example is the value of pharmaceuticals in various ecosystems. Massive economic potential - no one had a clue 20 years ago just how valuable this storehouse of organic chemicals could become.

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You aren't convincing me anything with the golden goose example. Preserving it would be extremely foolish.

[Borodog]

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But your argument is that the goose, even though it's worth more dead than alive, shouldn't be "pillaged". Please explain why.

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. . .

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Remember when I said that AC as a philosophy appears to take an almost sociopathic view of life as a game you play with money as a scoresheet?

Good times.

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Geez guys, no Pegasus that [censored] rubies worth $5000 per week?

[pvn]

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But your argument is that the goose, even though it's worth more dead than alive, shouldn't be "pillaged". Please explain why.

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What's your point, exactly?

[adanthar]

Borodog,

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

[pvn]

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But your argument is that the goose, even though it's worth more dead than alive, shouldn't be "pillaged". Please explain why.

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Remember when I said that AC as a philosophy appears to take an almost sociopathic view of life as a game you play with money as a scoresheet?

Good times.

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Good times, indeed. It was his example, not mine. I'm asking for someone to explain WHY the cost/benefit "scorecard" should be disregarded, and the decision that doesn't fit with the "scorecard" chosen. Can you provide an answer? Now is your BIG CHANCE to show how dumb the "scorekeeping" is.

Hint: you and iron are both walking into the same pile of poopoo.

[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.