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American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Dec, 2000 by Walter Rybeck
To an extent they do. The 250 million who visit the national parks each year for recreation and inspiration obtain what might be called an in-kind distribution from their land. The general public receives a public welfare distribution broadly defined, as national forests, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas conserve scenic beauty, ecological balance and air and water quality. The people receive monetary distribution from their public land. This takes the form of rents, fees, and royalties collected for the Treasury from grazing lands, timber, minerals, and petroleum resources, including billions annually from the leasing of off-shore drilling rights. It also takes the form of sales of portions of the public domain itself.
The preceding points present a partial but extremely misleading view unless seen against the fraud, waste, and corruption that have formed the backdrop of public land management. Instead of enriching the general public, federal lands are not even self-sustaining financially under present pricing policies. [38] Federal agencies and politicians caved in to special interests who won mineral rights and use of public lands at ridiculously low fees.
Massive land grants were given to railways to promote the opening up of the West. This occurred but at an unanticipated cost. Rail owners got so enmeshed in speculative schemes with their land empires that they let the railroad system fall into a decline from which it never fully recovered.
Ranching, mining, corporate farming and timber moguls are so accustomed to federal giveaways that they look upon them not as a privilege, but as a right. They support a so-called "property rights movement" and the "sagebrush revolution" that aim to diminish public controls over federal lands and the collection of rents from them. They support the wholesale turning over of the public domain to private ownership. Justice seems to call for retaining and enlarging the public domain and for setting user fees close to true economic rent. Landowning interests have successfully blocked moves in this direction.
Not surprisingly, people unschooled in Georgist philosophy find it hard to imagine that the invisible broadcast spectrum is "land" in an economic sense. Yet radio frequencies and television channels are clearly part of nature, part of the pubic domain. Traditionally, segments of the ether have been assigned cost-free, another case of taking what belongs to everyone to enrich a privileged few. In the 1990s, however, the government began selling some air waves at auction, reaping surprisingly high sums. This falls short of annual rentals to keep pace with the growing value of a scarce resource, but it is an advance over past practices.
XII
Two-Rate Taxes
THE MOST SUCCESSFUL efforts to increase taxes on America's land values in the 20th century have been in the state of Pennsylvania where, by 2000, eighteen cities (and two other local jurisdictions) had adopted the two-rate tax.
General Results. Because these cities simultaneously used many means to improve their performance, careful observers properly hesitate to claim specific effects due to the tax reform alone. To resolve this difficulty, two sets of surveys were undertaken: one, comparing each city's own construction record before and after adopting the two-rate tax, and two, comparing each city during the same time periods with similar neighboring cities that retained the conventional property tax. For example, see Table 5.
