With the panic over rising oil prices, the hijinks just don’t stop:

House Republicans on Thursday killed a Democratic plan designed to spur drilling on already available federal lands in Alaska, the West and the western Gulf of Mexico.

Republicans scoffed that the Drill Act — imposing a tougher “use it or lose it” rule on leases already held by oil companies — would do little to boost exploration. They renewed their demand to open up the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the eastern Gulf of Mexico to exploration.

The bill won a 244-173 majority, but still failed because it did not get a two-thirds margin under rules requiring a supermajority vote. (emphasis mine)

On a purely common sense basis, the rush to bring back offshore drilling falls flat.  There’s already tons of space where the oil companies have leases that they aren’t using.  Reason they aren’t using that land already is, given reasonable expectation prices will continue to go up, that oil is worth more to them in the ground than out of it, so they’d rather wait.  But clearly the story doesn’t end there…

Note that this is “federal” land being discussed, land that the government claims ownership of.  Knowing that the State cannot hold a legitimate property claim, the Democratic proposal is highly ironic: “use that land we shouldn’t have in the first place or we’ll take it back!”.  Though it probably wasn’t realized, they are in effect endorsing a Lockean interpretation of property — establishment comes through application of labor.  Thus, as long as the oil companies do not, well, drill for oil on the land, their claim to it voids itself.  Yet, at the same time, the government ownership is void already because of how they would come across such ownership in the first place!  We have two groups arguing over something neither should have, like a den of thieves coming to blows over how to distribute the gains.

That said, rather than stopping at Locke, let’s follow the logic and take up “occupancy and use” as the definition.  Now who rightfully controls the land?  The people that live on it and use it (or in the case of uninhabitable space, live near it).

Where this formulation leads is enlightening, particularly in just how far such consistency is from what has become accepted wisdom: the oil companies would be asking the people on or near these lands whether they could drill on them.  Now, I’m not assuming that everyone knows a lot about the economics behind oil, but given the status quo I think it’s safe to say getting a better deal would be inevitable.  At the least, cutting out the government middle man and having a higher likelihood of serious consideration of environmental impact would be a huge improvement already.