Natural Resource Use/Free Enterprise Primer

The government may sell natural resources even if the private sector has resources of the same kind. Gold from Ft. Knox sold after a federal budget default may deflate gold prices privately held. Oil from the strategic oil reserve was sold intentionally to drive down fuel price by increasing supply-I was against that incidentally.

I am writing about natural gas-not oil. There is a huge difference.

Making petroleum from oil involves quite a lot more processing than natural gas that burns right from the tap. The cost of building a bullet pipeline from the North Slope to Anchorage would be seven billion dollars, and half of the gas would be sold offshore perhaps and it might be necessary to build a new LNG plant and deepwater supertanker loaf facility, yet the people could buy cheaper natural gas with intellligent planning for a century. The state can sell its resource directly to the people and on the spot market to shippers.

Alaska has already had a 35 year relationship get a royalty from oil from the slope they let private corporations extract and ship out of state. Alaska has very high gasoline prices and is running out of oil supply-this is all very bad resource management policy including new offshore oil drilling and the potential for environmentally devastating oil spills in the future.

I will write here on the basic free enterprise/citizen relationship to natural resources in the public sector...

About Natural Resources And Free Enterprise

It might be useful to revisit a few of the basic practical concepts of free enterprise in this era where some Americans it means to get a paycheck from Wal-Mart or Exxon-Mobil. Adam Smith had practical ideas that resources and liberty are best used by everyone if kept free from big business bullies in corporations, gangs or government.

Individuals need private, personal resources to make their experience of life comfortable and or meaningful. Individuals require a healthy ecosphere and laws that keep gangs, collectives, governments and corporations from owning everything and making slaves of everyone. The public on an equal basis should have first free enterprise use of natural resources without being jacked by a technical, legalistic way to dump all the natural resource goods to a few.

Natural resources of a democratic society originally belong to the people (though some might say that the people belong to the resources). Air, land, water, and natural gas in abundance on public lands fall under the jurisdiction of public governance.

Unfenced frontiers given to settlers for work and making corner markers without onerous auctions that just the rich would win, rivers free flowing for all boaters and to fill urban water taps because the resource was not sold to Global Water Corporation Unlimited-this conservation of public natural resources requires environmental security defense and resource management to assure that the citizens might have the best opportunity for the use of the resource to freely construct their own valued prizes of leisure, of business travel, of energy etc. without permission from or payment to the Imperial Corporate Power organization.

It would be wrong and a betrayal of public trust for a government to auction off those resources en mass to the highest bidder in effect giving all of the chips at a discounted value to the rich.

Natural wilderness resources of the Americas as they remain will best be conserved. If natural resources are used egalitarian access to provide equal opportunity for citizen free enterprise is of higher social value than allowing an exclusive, global corporate ownership through idiot auction to the rich.

If the resource is non-renewable such as natural gas in Alaska then the state should provide access to the resource on public demand that will reinforce to the most egalitarian citizen resource access.

Free enterprise of a thousand souls generally creates the better odds for creative invention than when a thousand souls work for one rich dude. Allowing natural resources to be controlled by extreme limited access private interests endangers the political liberty of the many.

Free enterprise is a simple affair. One simply improves one's life with available resources. The more resources available to the public the more opportunities a soul has to get heat in winter, grow food in summer, have water to drink and so forth. it is important that public resources be protected and defended from destructive large scale exploitation to keep the resource fund alive.

Free enterprise does not require sale of merchandise. Sale of assets is a secondary activity from the store of personal property one has built up-usually the goods are exchanged for something one wants and does not have or a cash proxy.

The advantage of free trade is best found in an environment of abundant natural resources in which an individual may best find useful articles and materials to manufacture articles that would meet needs not answered by unmanufactured articles.

When cultures lose sight of common sense foundations for free trade and mistake purely abstract trading circumstances and practices that gain advantage for individuals positioned to exploit corporations to lever social and physical environments the free enterprise interests of the many and well being of democracy is reduced.