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Of late, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has complained mightily about having to sell some federal land in Nevada for about $10,000.
The land holds about $10 billion in gold, and critics of the mining law of 1872 say that the $10,000 is all that the U.S. treasury will ever see of the $10 billion, since the government collects no royalties on precious-metal discoveries on public lands.
The $10,000 argument isn't quite fair, because the mining company will presumably put money into the federal treasury, even without royalties: corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, etc.
Further, the gold in Nevada isn't exactly a bunch of nuggets waiting for someone to come along and scoop up a fortune. It's in microscopic particles that requires a considerable investment, about $1 billion in this case, to recover.
However, other exploiters of public-land resources -- oil companies, coal corporations, river outfitters, ski resorts -- do pay royalties or the like, and so it seems only fair to treat the precious-metal operations in the same way.
The Mining Law of 1872 is a relic of the day when federal policy toward the West was pretty simple: get the place settled and productive, and turn the public lands to private ownership as quickly as possible.
To that end, there were giveaways like the Homestead
Act. Railroads received vast land grants. Discoverers of
valuable mineral deposits got title -- a patent
--
to their sites. To assist in the process of discovery,
mineral surveys were made at public expense, so that anyone
picking up the Hayden Atlas of Colorado
in 1885
could glance at a map and learn the likely spots for good
ore.
The idea was to make the West just like the rest of America -- most land in private hands, and producing to its maximum economic potential.
Since then, the public mood has changed. Hardly anybody supports big transfers from the public domain to private hands; the idea now is that public lands should stay public. As long as that philosophy persists, the West will never be like the rest of America, because so much of the territory is controlled by the federal government.
Given that, changes in the Mining Law of 1872 are inevitable. It was designed for one national goal: to convert wastelands like Colorado and Nevada into pleasing replicas of Illinois. Now we've got a different national goal: to make the West an entertaining theme park for People of Money.
That's got to be the real agenda, even if it's usually stated in terms of finance and protecting the public treasury.
Look at last year's public-lands controversy, grazing
fees. Some folks were hollering about welfare
ranchers,
as if tripling the AUM fee would pay off the
public debt. However, if you confiscated every cow and
sheep that ever grazed on public land in 1990, the total
sum would pay 22 minutes of interest on the national
debt.
If you were truly worried about the national debt, instead of shaping the West to your own ends, you'd focus on something bigger than that. If you were truly concerned about the environment, you'd work with ranchers on the ground to devise better management practices. But if you were annoyed by rednecks or cow plops the last time you drove 150 miles so that you could experience 15 miles of scenic bliss on your $1,200 mountain bike, you don't complain about what really irks you. You complain instead about environmental abuses or grazing subsidies.
Come to mining, and the critics of the Mining Law of 1872 aren't really concerned about environmental abuses. If there's a market for gold and it's too expensive to mine it in the U.S., then the gold will be mined by $1-a-day laborers in Venezuela or Brazil, where there aren't many environmental regulations.
It's NIMBY on a global scale. People want the benefits of gold -- jewelry, tooth fillings, computer edge-card connectors that don't oxidize -- but don't want to put up with the mess of mining and milling the stuff. Cyanide seeping into the Amazon is just as toxic as cyanide seeping into the Alamosa River.
But what distresses Pamela and Courtney the most about
the great public-land giveaways to the mining
industry
is that the mining industry pays relatively
good wages -- in 1990, the average weekly miner's pay was
$600, as opposed to $180 in the service portion of the
tourist industry.
If the West is going to be a land of leisure, it needs a leisure class and a servant class. Those $600-a-week miners aren't about to volunteer to be servants. But get rid of their ugly worksites, and many will move on. Those who remain will take the $180 a week, and if there aren't enough of them, well, Vail already imports considerable help from Mexico, the Arkansas Valley, and other Third-World zones.
The argument over the Mining Law of 1872 isn't really about getting a fair return to the U.S. treasury. It's about making sure there are enough affordable servants.
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