Excellent opinion piece in the WSJ by eminent economist Thomas Sowell ("The World’s Biggest Landlord Is Washington")
Here are some extracts:
There is much to be said for the new administration’s plan to have a nongovernmental organization investigate how well, or how badly, government agencies are currently handling the taxpayers’ money. But there is a limit to how much money can be recovered by simply cutting back on “waste, fraud and abuse” in federal spending.
The federal government owns a little more than one-fourth of the total land area of the United States. The time is long overdue to consider whether that is the best economic arrangement. And reconsideration is especially needed at a time of urgent fiscal problems.
Steve Hanke, not exactly a favorite of ours in these parts of the internet, weighs in a letter published a week or so later:
Mr. Sowell argues that the federal government’s massive holdings of land are an anomalous and wasteful feature of the U.S. economic system, and that most of these lands should be privatized. I agree, and so did the nation’s founders. To a man, they saw the public domain as a way to generate revenue to discharge the public debt.
Em. Prof. Thomas Straka of Clemson University says "There are better ways to address our financial challenges."
I don't know what they might be, and I certainly haven't seen them.
Afuera with todo.
#privatize #everything
Non-paywalled here: https://archive.md/Q4Bcv