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Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
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Searching... Science | Book | 333.16 L528P, 1995 | 1 | Stacks | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... Science | Book | HD216 .L44 1995 | 1 | Stacks | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
In the United States, private ownership of land is not a new idea, yet the federal government retains title to roughly a quarter of the nation's land, including national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. Managing these properties is expensive and contentious, and few management decisions escape criticism. Some observers, however, argue that such criticism is largely misdirected. The fundamental problem, in their view, is collective ownership and its solution is privatization. A free market, they claim, directs privately owned resources to their most productive uses, and privatizing public lands would create a free market in their services. This timely study critically examines these issues, arguing that there is no sense of "productivity" for which it is true that greater productivity is both desirable and a likely consequence of privatizing public lands or "marketizing" their management. Lehmann's discussion is self-contained, with background chapters on federal lands and management agencies, economics, and ethics, and will interest philosophers as well as public policy analysts.
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
The desire to sell most of the remaining federally owned lands in the American West has been strengthened by proposals such as those offered by Richard Stroup and John A. Baden (Natural Resources: Bureaucratic Myths and Environmental Management, CH, Dec'83), who advocate selling or privatizing most public lands. This idea was part of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the early Reagan years and is associated with the current Wise Use Movement. Lehmann (philosophy, Univ. of Connecticut) examines privatization proposals in terms of their logical completeness and relationship to the common good and invokes, as needed, the perspective of analytical economics. Feeling that arguments for privatization have been incompletely developed, Lehmann begins by trying to strengthen the rationale for privatization. Once this is accomplished to his satisfaction he meticulously dissects weaknesses in those arguments. Using an anti-utilitarian perspective, he scrutinizes such terms as "productive," and "property rights," and raises questions about the neutrality of markets as ethical arbiters of environmental and public values. Along the way he offers valuable challenges to the so-called evils of collective management. Although critical of privatization proposals, the author also takes environmental groups to task for advocating a variant of privatization that he calls marketization. This book is the most stimulating discussion of these issues since Stroup and Baden and will no doubt spark controversy from both fans and opponents of privatization. Undergraduate through faculty. P. J. Pizor; Northwest College
Table of Contents
preface | p. vii |
1 Introduction | p. 3 |
2 Federal Lands, Past and Present | p. 31 |
Notes | p. 49 |
The Case for Privatization | p. 56 |
Notes | p. 75 |
4 Productivity Standards | p. 81 |
Notes | p. 104 |
5 The Productivity of Privatization | p. 109 |
Notes | p. 128 |
6 Rationalizing Economic Values | p. 132 |
Notes | p. 152 |
7 Ethics of Privatization | p. 156 |
Notes | p. 176 |
8 Self-Interest and Collective Management | p. 179 |
Notes | p. 197 |
9 Marketization | p. 201 |
Index | p. 229 |