Capitol Ideas/In Defense of Dirt
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS IN DEFENSE OF DIRT for a few days following the election of President Reagan the liberal-left observed a respectful silence, the better to conjure up in the rest of us the illusion...
...Now those nice old schoolmarms won't be so dependent on the oil companies...
...It is then that the Verboten signs start appearing...
...Why did the Western Governors' Conference also support Watt...
...Baden and Stroup point out that the bureaucrat's incentives are haywire...
...But Herblock showed a crazed Watt gouging out the entire U.S...
...A thousand dollars is spent to recover a hundred dollars-worth of timber...
...He is director of Montana State University's Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources...
...The prevailing view seems to be that when land is public, wise bureaucrats who have nothing but the "public interest" at heart will shape it into a veritable Eden...
...The Eastern Seaboard press cooed with delight...
...Epithets were experimentally rolled across the opinion columns, or ventriloquized onto the front page: "Militaristic . . . NATO . . . warmonger . . . Nixon White House . . . Watergate . . . Watergate...
...The foundation was established with money from Joseph Coors, the Colorado brewery president...
...If someone does something which harms the rights of others downstream, then they are likely to sue him...
...Senator Bobby Byrd, the West Virginian "populist" who had originally objected to Haig, huffily applied a pomade to his blue rinse, adjusted his scarlet waistcoat, and made a dignified retreat into the wainscoting...
...It is automatically and unthinkingly assumed by most people who don't actually live on or near public lands that public ownership is, of course, best...
...No takers...
...This is an economist's term best understood by visualizing an oil field owned by several people each of whom has sunk a shaft into the well...
...87 percent of Nevada is federally owned, 61 percent of Idaho...
...A fox in charge of the henhouse," echoed reliable old Tom Wicker, the New York Times associate editor who left North Carolina and Grew...
...Richard L. Stroup, Baden's co-director, and the co-au:hor of an excellent economics text, Economics: Private and Public Choice, points out that the Bureau of Land Management's practice of "chaining" - hauling a 600-foot anchor chain between parallel tractors, mowing down juniper forests with a view to creating grasslands for cattle-does immense damage to the environment...
...But they act as though they do...
...When land is publicly owned, it becomes the property not of you and me but of The State...
...On the other hand, those westerners who constitute the Sagebrush Rebellion would like to return federal lands to state ownership...
...One of the Times's anti-Watt editorials made the interesting comment: What is so puzzling about his appointment is its apparent political insensitiv-ity...
...topsoil and environment, under the caption: "If we get rid of all this stuff on top, there must be a lot of fuel underneath...
...But someone replied: "Watergate...
...Men in uniform start showing up, driving vehicles with sirens and flashing lights...
...As for oil drilling, it is a strange fact that it only seems to offend people when it takes place on public lands...
...But when individuals or companies drill for oil and gas on privately owned land, protesters vanish and everyone seems to be happy...
...Again, Baden points out, when various individuals own different segments of a stream or river, then they have rights in it-riparian rights...
...Unnecessary roads are expensively bulldozed into low-yielding timber stands high in the Rockies...
...He who pumps out oil first and longest profits at the expense of his co-owners...
...On the other hand, Weyerhauser's forests are not only profitable but well kept...
...This in turn would probably soon lead to private ownership...
...What about the polluted streams and oil derricks of the private owners...
...Senate, however, the political sensitivities had a curious geographical location...
...But it does build up political support for the Bureau among cattle ranchers...
...No, senator...
...The Herblock case was instructive, because he is normally careful to depict a state of affairs which is at least a reasonable inference from the facts...
...Not according to people who live out west...
...They may not own the land exactly...
...Twelve senators voted against Watt, all from states east of the Mississippi...
...He merely wants to rein in the land bureaucrats...
...Propaganda has encouraged many of us to believe that public property is owned by all...
...Mindless cartoons, attacking Watt as a despoiler of the environment, were drawn by Oliphant, Herblock, Auth, and others...
...All right, let's do that one again...
...As in the Soviet Union...
...Similarly, the bureaucrat who fails to tap the federal budget on behalf of his agency will lose this common pool resource (taxpayers' money) to more aggressive bureaucrats in rival agencies...
...They found natural gas, too-right next door to the gym, as it were...
...Government officials endlessly promote the false idea that "the state" means everyone...
...Ouch...
...My only objection to James Gaius Watt is that he has not already proposed this, and is most unlikely to do so...
...But when it is privately owned, oil derricks will replace trees, streams will become polluted, and a forest of "No Trespassing" signs will grow...
...DC Metro drivers ingratiatingly welcome passengers to "your Metro...
...The New York Times called Watt's appointment "the worst...
...Questioning Watt at his confirmation hearing, the somewhat gullible Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island asked: "Don't you feel that these federal lands belong to all the people...
...The great issue here, not even touched on by Watt himself in his - confirmation hearing, is the question of who best protects the environment: private, or public owners...
...The Washington Post called Watt "an undiscriminating advocate of private development interests...
...John Baden, a contributing editor to Bureaucracy Versus the Environment: The Environmental Costs of, Bureaucratic Governance (University of Michigan Press), points out that the U.S...
...Mary McGrory said Watt's mind was "chrome bright...
...For example, the Federal Trade Commission describes itself as "your FTC" in a booklet I recently came across...
...One possibility, not even considered by the Eastern liberals, who regard the West as a place where one occasionally goes skiing or backpacking, is that the changes desired by Watt would actually improve the environment...
...Haig sailed through unscathed...
...our headlines would have proclaimed...
...So let's sell off our public lands as soon as possible...
...tends to regard the federal budget as a "common pool resource...
...Pedagogues of Pillage...
...When Watt was finally confirmed by the U.S...
...CAPITOL IDEAS IN DEFENSE OF DIRT for a few days following the election of President Reagan the liberal-left observed a respectful silence, the better to conjure up in the rest of us the illusion that they too are lovers of democracy and are only too happy to abide by its electoral verdicts...
...It would be better to get rid of them entirely.o get rid of them entirely...
...Thus, not ecological perfection, but bureaucratic competition, tends to determine the behavior of those with responsibility for public lands...
...the highest percentage east of the Mississippi, 12 percent, is in New Hampshire...
...Then Reagan appointed James Gaius Watt to be Secretary of the Interior, custodian of the nation's federally owned 400 million acres, the great majority of them west of the Mississippi...
...Soil is eroded...
...But can you imagine the cries of outrage if the same Wells capital had been used to prospect for gas a few miles away on public land...
...Watt was president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver, a public interest law center "dedicated to bringing a balance to the courts in the defense of individual liberty and the private enterprise system...
...Unlike the senators who voted against, and the left-liberal journalists who howled at Watt, Baden lives out, there amid the bureaucratic wreckage...
...But within a week or two we began to hear the familiar, restless rustling of cockroach wings, ; the renewed stirring of the termites, the death-watch beetle patrolling once again in the national heart-of-oak...
...Forest Service officials are under bureaucratic pressure to advocate more funding for their region, regardless of ecological suitability...
...William Turnage, executive director of the Wilderness Society, called Watt "a joke," and "a caricature of an anti-environmentalist...
...How to strike back at the superannuated actor, who wanted to do the unforgivable thing-reduce the size and role of government-without too conspicuously expressing resentment of majorities ? The appointment of Al Haig as Secretary of State at first seemed to present an opportunity...
...Watt declared himself opposed to environmental "extremism...
...Reagan looked on admiringly...
...Actually, drilling seems to give maximum offense, somehow, at the planning stage...
...Forest Service does not know how to manage timber production because political pressure causes it to maximize expenditures without having to think about cost-effectiveness...
...Consider the recent exploration for natural gas on school grounds by Wells College, a fashionable girls' school in New York state...
...you may respond, they will at least do a good job of looking after the environment...
...There are many conservatives whose appointment would not so inflame environmentalists...
...Wildlife habitats are destroyed...
...Apostle of Pillage," shouted a Village Voice headline above an article co-authored by trendy-trotsky by Tom Betheil Alex Cockburn, Wall Street Journal columnist and heiress-admirer...
...Clearly, Herblock felt that, when it came to Watt, extremism in the defense of environmentalism was no vice...
...Custodial rights to this no-man's land then devolve upon park rangers and federal bureaucrats who are empowered to tell private citizens exactly what they can and cannot do...
...Here, then, another opportunity presented itself: "A goat to guard the cabbage patch," said John B. Oakes, the former senior editor of the New York Times who detected early on that environmentalism, if co-opted by the right (left) people, could unobtrusively advance the cause of socialism...
...But...
...When land is federally owned, it is owned by no one...
...But when no riparian rights exist, the incentives to prevent pollution don't exist either...
...How come not one of the Western senators came forward to defend the West (where 95 percent of the public lands are located) against this environmental pillager...
Vol. 14 • April 1981 • No. 4
