Logan Ferre reads the New York Times so you don’t have to, & shares with us the following:

New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

So this land, land that is rhetorically referred to as “public” despite it being held captive by the State, is being handed off for pumping at no cost. Gee, how convenient.

This is a perfect example of the problem with referring to government property as “public”. If it were public in the true sense of the word (i.e.: owned by the entirety of the people in the area) then whether they could get oil from there would be a matter of weighing their desires & the impact fulfilling them would have in comparison to what others might want to do on the land. Then, even if it was decided they could drill there then depending on the attitude of the ones in the area, they might ask to be compensated for the use of it. So, what is relevant here isn’t the outcome — for all we know, a different setup might’ve still allowed the drilling & pumping — but the process used. True “public” property brings to mind an entirely different structure.

Instead, an arm of the administration simply decided “sure, go ahead and get that oil! We won’t even charge!”, Thus Spoke Bushathusta.

Oil companies, already subsidized to ridiculous lengths, can just have at it on “public” land. Yet just try skipping a tax payment….

If the contradiction were recognized, then there’d be no such thing as “federal territory”, & people would be free to either allow or disallow whatever they wanted on their land, & if they allowed it they could charge for it. Easing up on one use of resources in deliberate spite of all others isn’t lessening government, it’s just shifting it onto other people. Makes about as much sense as trying to trick a scale into thinking you lost weight by standing on it w/ only one foot.

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