Is that it's the collusion of big business and the government that is causing the damage. Subsidies, and government-financed roads, are only part of it. If business had to pick up the full costs of what they were doing, in many cases they wouldn't be doing it.
Papers I've read show that rain forests, properly managed and exploited in a renewable manner (ideally by locals), yields far more profit for much longer than one that is simply cleared for lumber, ranching or farming. Although you wouldn't know it to look at it, rain forest land, minus the forest, is often not very fertile.
Conversion of "public" land to private property is a complex business, and it's not as easy to lay out rules as it was back in the homesteading days. I'd like to see more Federal land go to private use, but I fear that the process would be corrupted by politics and palm-greasing, resulting in land going for far less than true market values.
Off Topic » in reply to Catch-22
What you miss about Brazil...
The whole thread (42 posts)
- On property rights, continued from Geek Speak.
- re: On property rights, continued from Geek Speak.
- re: On property rights
- Farmer
- The Libertarian nonsense belongs with UFOs and Crop Circles.