Here’s the abstract of a new paper by the great economic historian Gary Libecap:
The US federal government owns and administers 472,892,659 acres or 21% of the land area of the lower 48 states, the country’s largest landowner. The resource is held and managed as a collective resource, the Federal Lands, through political and bureaucratic interpretation of the Multiple Use principle and generally, the biological aim of maximum sustained-yield. By contrast, access, exchange, and investment for most other US natural resources are through private property rights and markets. Despite the magnitude of the resource, economists have devoted relatively limited attention to the economic and welfare impact. The objective is to suggest economic implications and to encourage additional economic analyses. The discussion summarizes federal lands privatization through 1891, when withholding of federal lands began. The literature reveals no demonstratable market failure or increased resource scarcity from private exploitation between 1870 and 1957 when most lands were withheld. Because land was nonmobile and observable private property rights could have been assigned and any externalities addressed via Pigouvian restrictions or Coasean exchange. Federal ownership was not obviously required. Progressive Era reformers, driven by concerns of impending resource depletion, called for scientific, sustained-yield management by government officials. The institutional change is economically important. As outlined by Dixit and others, private rights holders have high powered incentives for efficient resource use that are lacking in decision making by agency officials who do not hold exchangeable property rights and do not directly bear the economic costs and benefits of their actions. Consequential public goods delivery could be an offset, but these are not measured for tradeoff calculations. Following Krueger, a rent-seeking framework is presented for comparing outcomes with economic property rights and political management. The analysis suggests that a.) federal lands will have lower production value than comparable private, all else equal; (b). federal lands management will be less responsive to shifts in economic costs and benefits. Public goods may be provided for high amenity, recreation, and ecological areas, but the dominant Multiple Use management principle provides no objective criteria for allocation or for periodic outcome assessment and adjustment. A literature review and data for contemporary federal forests, range, and oil and gas lands are provided.
Talking up tariffs is a way for Republicans to stay on President Trump’s good side, but in practice those tariffs hurt their constituents. Thus the pleas behind closed doors for exemptions. Step right up, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt.
“What the media won’t tell you is that President Trump’s tariffs work,” Ms. Britt wrote in February, after the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s “emergency” tariffs. “We are not going to return to the status quo of allowing American jobs and manufacturing to be sidelined in exchange for cheap junk from foreign adversaries.”
What Ms. Britt won’t tell you is that she was privately seeking exemptions 10 months earlier. That’s when her legislative director wrote an email, “Sen. Britt Alabama Trade Priorities,” seeking help for “specific Alabama manufacturers.” We obtained the email from the U.S. Trade Representative’s office via the Freedom of Information Act. The email begins by saying Ms. Britt “is supportive” of rebalancing trade. Then it moves to “four pressing issues,” each a plea for an Alabama company.
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Tariffs for thee, exemptions for me. Join the GOP club: In Mr. Trump’s first term, Sen. Josh Hawley lobbied for a carveout on saw blades, Rep. Mark Meadows on furniture wood, Rep. Andy Biggs on patio screens. Who else? When more records arrive, we’ll let you know.
New polling from @CatoInstitute shows that 70% of Americans – and even 56% of Republicans! – think the President should be required to get congressional approval before imposing new US tariffs.
Calls for government intervention seem unnecessary for an industry that has shown it can self-regulate its leading companies. When OpenAI found its advanced models escaped their test environment and reached the internet earlier this year, it handled the incident in concert with industry partners like CrowdStrike, METR, and Redwood Research, which specialize in AI cybersecurity. Anthropic is even more stringent with its security checks. In July, it halted all active testing, notified its partners, and published a detailed report after its models reached the internet due to a mistake in the testing environment setup.
John Stossel understandably applauds the breaking of the fever for “net zero” carbon emissions.
