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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said on Thursday he has sent recommendations from his review of more than two dozen national monuments to President Donald Trump, indicating that some could be scaled back to allow for more hunting and fishing and economic development.
The recommendations follow a 120-day study of 27 national monuments across the country, created by presidents since 1996, that Trump ordered in April as part of his broader effort to increase development on federal lands.
The review has cheered energy, mining, ranching and timber advocates but has drawn widespread criticism and threats of lawsuits from conservation groups and the outdoor recreation industry.
There were fears that Zinke would recommend the outright elimination of some of the monuments on the list, but on Thursday, speaking to the Associated Press in Billings, Montana, he said he will not recommend eliminating any.
Zinke said in a statement that the recommendations would "provide a much needed change for the local communities who border and rely on these lands for hunting and fishing, economic development, traditional uses, and recreation." He did not specify which monuments he plans to recommend be scaled back.
The Associated Press reported that Zinke said he would recommend changing the boundaries for a "handful" of sites.
If you're taking millions of acres off the table for one site, you fail at knowing the definition of a monument.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-interior-monuments-idUSKCN1B41YA
Also at RT, CNN, The Washington Post and The Hill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @03:13PM (12 children)
You can't have it both ways. Either "profit" is a stand-in for "general benefit" or it is specific to the capitalist economic model. If it is a general word to indicate benefits in any form then you must drop the focus on private ownership. If not you're intellectually bankrupt and kindly go back to school.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @03:35PM (6 children)
Capitalism is not separable from "profit", even in the most general sense of the word.
This is because nobody knows what anything should cost, or what something should be priced—society has to find these values; centuries of experiments (and, last century in particular) have revealed that so far, we only know one good way to find these values:
The Price Mechanism
For a system as complex as society, the only workable solution for finding the values in question seems to be evolution by variation (supplier competition) and selection (consumer choice); as you can see, we're making our way towards capitalism.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @05:19PM (5 children)
Ah yes, the "free market" which does not actually exist and unless you manage to solve the pesky "human" problem it will never exist. Update your presumptions, cross reference with reality.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @06:41PM (4 children)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @07:26PM (3 children)
Free market when you want it to solve efficiency problems or get rid of regulation, don't need a free market for pricing mechanisms to work.
God DAMN how has your existence not ruptured the space time continuum?
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @08:54PM (2 children)
You got it.
Because I understand nuance apparently. Tools don't have to work absolutely perfectly in order to be usable tools.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @10:41PM (1 child)
Hahahah, ok whatever khallow, remain a walking paradox and enjoy all the arguments you can until people realize its just easier to ignore you. Only reason I respond is so that some random person isn't suckered into your semi-reasonable yet contradictory statements.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 02 2017, @05:34AM
The second sentence says nothing about the first and vice versa, hence they can't contradict each other. A freer market tends to be more efficient and less ridden with regulation, neither which really has anything to do with the existence of pricing mechanisms (the efficiency of the mechanism, sure, but not whether it exists). But you can have a market that's pretty far from the free market ideal and still have pricing mechanisms. You just need a few things like price discovery and voluntary trade. And that's pretty much it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @05:47PM (4 children)
This is ridiculous. There's a huge number of words out there with multiple meanings. Nothing magical about profit that it can't have multiple meanings as well. I get that you don't want semantic mixing of the term, but that isn't actually happening here. The claim is being made that personal profit is usually societal profit as well. Sure, it's not always true, there are plenty of examples of activities that have huge externalities to them that outweigh the benefit of the activity to the involved parties. But most activities don't have those huge externalities.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @06:28PM (3 children)
You are ridiculous. Words can have multiple meanings, no one is saying profit can only mean one thing. However, when making an argument you can't substitute in the various definitions to support the narrow definition of privatized business profits.
EXACTLY! So can we stop this pointless debate? National parks / monuments are a public good, privatizing them is the continuation of robbing the public for corporate profits.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @06:57PM (2 children)
Unless we benefit more from privatizing them than the loss of the public good. Then it's not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @07:04PM (1 child)
If something is better then it is better. If it isn't better then it is not better. I will go with historical evidence of corporations abusing natural resources for their own profits instead of this hypothetical privatized system you imagine.
Draft up your proposals, include a contract that enforces environmental protections and limits on what the private owners can do, THEN we can discuss whether the public land should be privatized. You want me to trust the market / corporations? I refer again to historical evidence.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 02 2017, @07:39PM
And? Abusing natural resources is not necessarily a bad thing. All our stuff is made from abused natural resources.
Why should the rights of the land owner be limited in such a way? What's going on here is that for the past twenty years, the federal government has been using the Antiquities Law to reserve large tracts of land by presidential decree. It's relatively mild right now with perhaps 1-2k square miles land area and ~50k square miles of sea area reserved per year on average over the past two decades. But there's nothing legally to prevent future presidents from escalating this to vast fractions of the US in the future and using the power to push their agendas. There needs to be some pushback.