OPINION/COMMENTARY

Statement of Paul J. Gessing, Director of Government Affairs, National Taxpayers Union before the House Resources Subcommittee on Forests & Forest Health on Federal Land Ownership and Management

I come here today to offer testimony on the subject of current federal land policies and how they affect taxpayers in particular, as well as state and local governments. Of course, as you already know, the federal government is not just a major player in land ownership and management; it is the biggest single land owner in the country. Approximately 670 million acres, or 29 percent of America's 2.3 billion acres of land, is owned by the federal government. Most of the federal government's land holdings can be found in the west, representing over half of the acreage in Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Alaska, and Nevada. Federal ownership is most prevalent in Nevada, at 79 percent. Taxpayers, as collective owners, do indeed gain some benefit from these lands. The most visible beneficiaries are the millions of annual visitors to various national parks throughout the country. Of course, Americans derive other benefits from federal lands. Ranchers use them for grazing, timber companies and their employees receive gains from the harvesting of timber, and sportsmen derive enjoyment from the preservation of habitats for fish and game. To my knowledge, there have been no exhaustive efforts to tabulate the economic benefits of federal lands, but they are certainly significant. I must make it clear, however, that there is a difference between receiving "some benefit" from a service -- government or otherwise -- and actually putting resources to their best possible use. As Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich A. Hayek made clear in his treatise Prices and Production, the fatal flaw of socialism is that it lacks the necessary market prices that so effectively serve as guides for our everyday purchasing decisions. Because socialism has no means of ascertaining which production possibilities are economically feasible, our nation's current heavily-socialized land management system is tremendously inefficient. This is a flaw that cannot be fixed without the reintroduction of market forces, preferably through the sale of significant amounts of federal lands....

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