[boris]

"If land is not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public property, it is utilized without any regard to the disadvantages resulting. Those who are in a position to appropriate to themselves the returns—lumber and game of the forests, fish of the water areas, and mineral deposits of the subsoil—do not bother about the later effects of their mode of exploitation. For them the erosion of the soil, the depletion of the exhaustible resources and other impairments of the future utilization are external costs not entering into their calculation of input and output. They cut down the trees without any regard for fresh shoots or reforestation. In hunting and fishing they do not shrink from methods preventing the repopulation of the hunting and fishing grounds."

I read Human Action a long time ago in college. I don't recall this paragraph but that is just old age.

However this touches a nerve. "Resources" that cannot be exploited are not resources. So-called "renewable" resources (such as trees) obviously benefit from private ownership (the owner can plant new ones). But "and mineral deposits of the subsoil" cannot and do not benefit from such husbandry. There is a finite--but enormous--supply of them. They can be recycled if the marginal cost of refining ore becomes high enough. Eventually we can place asteroids full of valuable metals in earth orbit and exploit them.

But "National Resources Defense Council" types oppose the exploitation of all resources; which is to say, they work to convert resources to non-resources. There is no limit to their desire to deny man of the resources he needs to survive; they are anti human, not pro-nature.

--Boris

[sourcery]

You're right that some resources are not renewable. However, Mises' point was that a private owner of the land has an interest in a) balancing the benefits from mining the non-renewable resources in his land against the other uses to which the land could be put, and against preserving the value of the land after all the non-renewable resources have been used up, and b) regulating the rate at which resources are extracted from his land so as to maximize total income over the life of the resource (the Opec countries do this, for example.)

It's true that in many cases the economically prudent strategy for a landowner is to exploit the land's non-renewable resources. But even in that case, there's a difference between prudent management of one's property and raping land that doesn't belong to you.

[Tauzero]

"But 'and mineral deposits of the subsoil' cannot and do not benefit from such husbandry."

Not the minerals themselves, no, but other property immediately surrounding the minerals and affected by the manner of mineral extraction can; consideration of them might result in different extraction methods.

Public land is more likely to be strip mined.

[Old Professer]

To them, there is no difference.