The Antiquities Act of 1906 is one of the least efficient ways to allocate public lands.
The Antiquities Act of 1906 is one of the least efficient ways to allocate public lands.
P resident Biden was flatly wrong to designate “nearly 1 million acres of greater Grand Canyon landscape” a national monument if allocative efficiency is the standard of judgment.
Today, the Biden administration invoked the Antiquities Act of 1906 to declare the 917,618 acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service in northern Arizona a national monument.
According to the fact sheet released by the White House, the move “protects . . . sacred places for [the] cultural and spiritual uses” of local Native American tribes. Not mentioned in the memo: the land’s valuable uranium deposits, which could be extracted and refined to power nuclear-fission reactors — something the administration should be interested in if it’s serious about its “historic” climate agenda.
Regarding this land, uranium-mining and tribal preferences are competing interests.
Assuming that these two uses are mutually exclusive, how should the federal government have gone about the land’s allocation?
Unilaterally declaring it to be the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument (a mouthful, I know) — is the least efficient way to resolve the issue. To ensure that these nearly million acres are put to their highest-valued use (read: provide human beings the most utility), the federal government should have put them up for auction or transferred ownership to Native American tribes.
In an auction, Native American tribes and uranium-mining operations (among other private concerns) would compete with each other for property rights. If the uranium-miners outbid the Native Americans, it would demonstrate that powering cities, electric cars, and all those appliances that render our lives possible, comfortable, and enjoyable is in a sense more valuable (and certainly more profitable) to the miners than the land’s scenic beauty and religious significance is to Native Americans and others. If the tribes outbid the uranium-miners, then the reverse is the case.
But what to do if the tribes value the religious use of the land more than the miners value its deposits but simply lack the ability to pay for it?
If the administration were to prioritize its respect for tribal sovereignty — as it claims in its press release — and religious tradition, then transferring property rights to the tribes would be another optimal way to allocate the land. The tribes would be able to assign the acreage to its highest-valued use, be that conservation, sacred rituals, or sale to those mining concerns whose expected profit from the land might exceed the utility derived from it by the tribes.
If the Biden administration is serious about climate change and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, then the building and powering of more nuclear reactors should be promoted, not stymied; uranium-miners should be invited to bid for the land.
Alternatively, if the administration wishes to honor preexisting Native American tribal claims to the land, it should grant the tribes full property rights thereto, allowing them to retain, auction, or divvy up the acres as is most profitable to them.
What the administration should not do is what it has done: Declare the land public ad infinitum, thereby precluding private ownership and preventing free markets from allocating the land efficiently.