That some conservatives believe the left-wing fiction that private ownership means environmental destruction is a sign that they badly need basic economic education.
When Republicans talk about selling federal land, people’s minds immediately go to national parks and their unparalleled beauty. The government should not sell off any national parks, but it should absolutely sell off a bunch of land.
For perspective, the largest private landowner in the United States is the Emmerson family, which owns 2.4 million acres of timberland. The federal government owns 640 million acres, which is over a quarter of all land in the country.
The National Park Service manages only 12.5 percent of those 640 million acres. Again, when talking about selling federal land, Republicans aren’t talking about national parks.
They’re talking about the insanity that, in a purportedly free country, the federal government owns:
Those are the only states whose federal lands are eligible for sale under the language included by Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And the legislation would mandate the sale of only 0.5 to 0.75 percent of the total land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service.
The legislation says that land would be nominated for sale by state and local government officials in the states affected. Sales would not be made in contradiction to states’ wishes. In fact, officials in Utah have been among the leaders in wishing to reduce the federal footprint in their state.
As Ethan Blevins of the Pacific Legal Foundation wrote for NR last year, Utah wants the federal government to give it control over the 18.8 million acres of its land that is federally owned but not designated for any specific use, such as a national park or forest. The state government would be free to manage it itself or sell the land if it wanted.
As Blevins wrote, “the federal government is not a typical property owner”:
It gets to write the rules for all that land, including the criminal laws. So, in each of the twelve Western states, most of the state is not ruled by the governor, the state legislature, or state agencies — it is governed by regulators in Washington, D.C. For most of the Western United States, an unelected federal bureaucrat is the only sheriff in town.
Increasing state power relative to federal power and increasing private-sector ownership relative to public-sector ownership are both conservative goals that Republicans should be proud to champion.
That some conservatives are glomming onto the left-wing fiction that private ownership means environmental destruction is another sign that they are in desperate need of basic economic education. The clear-cutting of forests by private logging companies, for example, is something that happens when land is not privately owned, or because property rights go unenforced. That’s what happened in the Amazon, where weak enforcement of property rights and widescale public ownership have allowed for environmental destruction.
When a logging company owns the land it logs, it has strong incentives to keep the forest healthy because it has a stake not only in the current profits from the trees that are already there but also in the future profits from the trees yet to come. Similarly, land owned by groups such as Ducks Unlimited is well conserved because the hunters who pay to conserve the land want it to be there for their children and grandchildren as well.
And plenty of the federal land that would be sold is not so beautiful or in dire need of environmental conservation anyway. It should be used for mining or energy production, dirty pursuits that nonetheless make modern life better. Republicans should have no problem saying so, as the party not in thrall to the radical environmentalist groups Democrats humbly obey.
Lee’s legislation is a small step toward greater private land ownership that any conservative should support. The U.S. has a federal government, not a monarch who presumptively owns all the country’s land.