Privatization needed

A front-page headline in this paper recently read, “$36 M needed to pay owners.” That is $36 million needed to pay local land owners for the government’s exercise of its eminent domain powers. When the government seizes private property for public use, it must compensate land owners for the condemned property. Hence, the need for the $36 million (or more).

Now, how does our notoriously debt-ridden local government intend to pay for these private land takings? Naturally, in the worst way possible–that is, by incurring still more government debt. That’s right, despite persistent government deficits, our enlightened government actually proposes to float more government bonds and put us further in a hock. Count on our leaders to make bad decisions.

What decision should our leaders make instead? Why, the decision for the complete privatization of public lands, of course. This is a tremendous privatization opportunity for the CNMI government. This is a chance to aggressively pursue public land exchanges as compensation for seized private property. This privatization proposal is the best available option for a few key reasons.

First, and most obvious, by privatizing public lands, we avoid further debt and save millions of dollars. The advantages of avoiding this potential multi-million liability should be quite self-evident to all objective parties.
It is obviously highly desirable to avoid the pitfalls of massive debt. No further elaboration is necessary on this point.

Second, by eliminating nearly all public lands through wholesale privatization, we eliminate the need to incur expenses in the supervision of those public properties. Thus, the Division of Public Lands could be abolished, accruing even more cost savings.

Third, by abolishing all public lands, we empower private land-owners by offering them even more profitable real estate opportunities. Now that public land is abolished, the private landowner no longer has to compete with the government for land leases. The people would consequently benefit more directly from development.

By doing this, we would also naturally limit government corruption in the public land lease area. We would be taking power away from the politicians and bureaucrats and handing it over directly to the people–to private individuals in a free real estate market.
Remember: Less government means much more liberty.

Apart from aggressively pursuing land exchanges, the government may also take another route. It could auction off all public lands to the highest bidder and then use the proceeds to compensate private land-owners for exercising its powers of eminent domain.
Either way, both the taxpayer and the aggrieved land-owner come out ahead. And we all benefit from lower taxes and more limited government.

Of course, to make more money, we would have to scrap racist Article 12 first.