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Do you also want to charge disneyland rates for beach access? For national parks? The only people who benefit from them are the ones who live near. You reali
by bpodgursky 7y ago
Do you also want to charge disneyland rates for beach access? For national parks? The only people who benefit from them are the ones who live near.
You realize that most land in the country, period, was bought and given away for nominal prices, right? Farmland in the midwest is privately owned and was (almost) given away. Your house is built on land that was sold to homesteaders on the cheap. The point of government isn't short-term profit maximization.
The only functional difference here is that grazing land wasn't as easy to manage if you privatized individual tracts. Those grazing rights have existed for generations, and the entire system was set up with the presumption that those were perpetual rights.
- Retric 7y agoNational parks get visitors from across the country, with individual parks getting up to 15 million visitors. Beach and river access are similarly popular nationwide. However, people must both live near and own cattle to benifit from this subsidy limiting things to 18,000 permits nationwide for 155 million acres. Charging market rates to parks thus has little upside for the general public as a large fraction visit parks, rivers etc. However, charging market rates for grazing is a net benefit to both the general public and ranchers outside the area. Finally, cows are actively harming the ecosystem in that area so there is a multitude of hidden costs to these subsidies.