Ivory Tower Academics

Via Ross, the tastefully named Alex Tabarrok proposes we sell some of the government owned land in the western half of the country in order to pay off our debt.

Thank God that Ivory Tower Academics like this usually don't get far.

First off, where are the trillionaires that Tabarrok thinks are going to pony up for this land? Only the tiniest top percentage of Americans are capable of buying land in the remote backwoods of the rockies, and of those, most would find it impossible to actually get to the land they had bought. The majority of these huge tracts of government land don't exactly have paved roads.

Secondly, the only reason the logging industry doesn't go chainsaw-happy on most of the lodgepole pine forest of the Rockies is because the government owns all the land they'd love to strip. Opening up land for private sale would mean the logging industry would quickly swallow up any land with fertile forest, and strip-cut it. The current plan allows the logging industry to lease land with required replanting regulations. Privately owned land is unregulated.

Third, the least obvious, but most important, reason that this is a terrible idea is water. West of the 100th Vertical (longitude), irrigation is absolutely required to produce profitable crops. With the Colorado river drying up via towns like Vegas and Reno sucking it dry, reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead at 50% capacity, the last thing we should do as a country is encourage development of more cities in the water-vacant West.

But wait, Tabarrok makes the point this should be done because the government needs funds...and then says we should use the funds from land sales to...buy more land! How does that solve our fiscal deficit at all? Sell the desert to buy the plains?


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