Are there any private rivers? Or other examples of libertarian style privatizations.

I attended a debate by a CATO fellow and another guy who headed a state government division that works with corporations. (green energy, government firguring out what industry should advance and which ones should go away, ect.)

Anyways the libertarians have some interesting views on privitization that go beyond simple property rights. He suggested that we could cut way down on pollution of a river by privatizing parts of it. So let's Minnesotan's are dumping garbage in the Mississippi and Loiusiana is angry about this, Folks in Louisiana could bring suit against the Minnesotans who are causing pollution.

I heard Rush talking about logging companies and how when they lease land from the government, they strip it to nothing and kill the forest but when they own it, they replant since they have a financial interest. Any examples of that?

And the arguement of allowing hunting of endangered species on the thought that people will have an inscentive to make sure they don't die out.

And wacky stuff like privatizing oxygen.

BTW the CATO guy mopped the floor with the governtment guy. He made an empassioned speech about greed that would make Gordon Gekko feel like Mother Teresa.

Curiousity, I haz it.

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I thought the US Army Corps of Engineers had jurisdiction over all navigable waters of the United States?

Neva been done. Neva will be done. Done.

Riparian rights are a complex issue that date back to Engilsh Common Law. Lots of litigation on it over the years.

Get "The Market For Liberty" by Linda and Morris Tannehill... very interesting read. Its all about this topic.

But we need to toss those hundreds, ne perhaps a thousand years of law aside for an unproven theory of human interaction because it will be more betterer. I know because Ayn Rand said so.

They are privately owned. The ownership just changes hands sometimes during election.

You would have to have a pretty large property to have a private river. I know a guy here in Nevada and his ranch contains the spring which is the source of the Muddy River. The muddy river is a tributary to Lake Mead and because of this all manner of people government and otherwise are allowed to travel up the river onto his property. Apparently you aren't allowed to own the river itself. Interesting this is, he is not required to allow access through the property to get to the spring, so environmentalists and scientists and whatnot have to go farther downstream and hike up the river (really just a stream) to get to the source.

I think to own an entire river you would need to own the source, the destination (which would need to be a lake with no exit), and all land in-between, and all of those lands should not contain any sort of protected species. I don't think it's possible.

I'll bet some of you think you have property rights even when there isn't running water involved.

Man, that's rich.

Whooo!

navigable waters = you can't own it (roughly stated)

look up "public trust doctrine"

If you owned all of the land surrounding a river––including the source and the terminating lake––maybe you could make an argument that since no one can access the river, that it's non-navigable, therefore you can own it. . .

Yes, and did you notice how the guy from CATO completely ignored the fact that interstate disputes such as pollution which crosses state lines were the main reason our nation wrote and adopted that Constitution thingy back in 1787? Why on earth does he advocate a return to the Articles of Confederation?

Look, the federal government is not the most efficient way to do things, the feds have usurped many powers which should be handled at the state, local or private level, and there are certainly plenty of federal functions which could be devolved to the states or privatized. But there are legitimate federal functions which are authorized by the Constitution –– after all, that was the reason we adopted the darn thing in the first place.

I like CATO, but sometimes their ideas are just .

Ginnie Springs, FL

They seem to own the springs that feed the river on which you float.

"Navigable" waters are "waters of the United States" and are held in trust by the Federal or State government as steward for the People.

Privatizing rivers is a BAD idea, in my opinion.

Please note, states will have different rules about navigable rivers. For example in some states, you can float a river but not walk on the river bed or shore.

There is a river in Texas for which the bottom is privately owned.


To help you understand - you can float in the river all day. But as soon as you put your foot on the riverbed, or bank, you're trespassing.



It is one of the cleanest most pristine rivers I have ever visited.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devils_River_%28Texas%29


*note the wikipedia article is incorrect on the ownership point, in the case of this river. It is true for all other rivers in Texas.

I'm not quite sure that the private ownership deserves all the credit here.
"Its remote location in a hostile environment limits pollution from human and animal populations. In addition, the river flows underground for part of its journey."

No doubt - it IS remote, and IS in a rugged area.


But is hardly inaccessible. And the underground portion is mostly up-river.

It being upriver helps more than if it were downriver.

I wonder how they got legal claim to the bed and banks, but not the water itself. That sounds like a crazy mishmash of different rules.

But then you'd still have the state DNR telling you what/when you could fish in it...


Was at a buddies house the other day fishing. He has 3 man made ponds on his property. He stocks the ponds with game fish, which he buys legally from fisheries. He had the first pond dredged last year and the fish from it put in the other two ponds, when they did that he said there were just a TON of bass and not much for panfish. He doesn't eat fish, just enjoys fishing so he invited me and another guy over to catch some bass to take home. We were catching a lot of 12-13" bass that day, legal size in WI is 14". We only caught one legal bass that day, a 17". I'm thinking to myself "why in the hell does the state fishing guidelines cover his private pond, with the fish that he legally bought and put in here?" I couldn't come up with a good reason.

Here in VA fish in a private pond are yours to do with as you please. Besides, is the game warden scoping out private ponds looking for folks keeping fish under the limit?

the issue here is that privatization would eventually result in government control anyway. it still requires sovereignty to settle disputes via lawsuit, and water rights have been a very fractious point for several thousand years. that's not going away––it is actually going to get worse. so the end state of that is to have a body that specializes in the arbitration of competing environmental demands––IOW, the end state is the EPA.

secondly (and this is where oxygen comes in), privatization of a fundamental resource like oxygen or water literally gives the power of life and death to private concerns that are not publicly accountable. think of the air inside the dome in the movie "total recall". if i own that, then i can kill everyone in the dome by denying them my property, and i can't be held accountable for murder because i have the right to do what i wish with my own property.

finally, how can you "own" a river? what is it that you would own? you can't own the water molecules in the river, because those are changing every second. you can't really own the volume of water on your property, because that changes depending on weather/season/downstream flow. if you owned the riverbed, then anyone upstream could deny you the water because they would have the right of diversion. so you'd just own a piece of land that could not be called be called a "river".

so it's a lot more complicated than it sounds. in addition to some good suggestions elsewhere in the thread, you might enjoy reading about the "law of capture", which is a water rights paradigm that was historically popular, and is still used in some places today.

I thought that was how things were done back in the stone age, but not today, maybe I'm wrong... You can find examples of (poorly|well) managed (private|public) land, none of which proves anything definitive.

I generally agree with what Rush said on this, but here's a counter examples to what Rush said, and sorry I forget all the details.

An Alaskan Indian tribe was given title to several 1000s of acres of federal land, essentially they privately owned it. And what did these "nature worshipers" do with it ? They clear cut the land to put money in their pocket immediately and caused an environmental disaster, not only on their land but surrounding land and a nearby river. If you want to argue Indian tribes are fundamentally communist I won't disagree, but they owned that land free and clear and screwed it up. And, it will stay screwed up for many years to come. Federal law against clear cutting forest don't apply to Indian tribes, basically, the land give away was a political move by Washington to win some votes.

There are a lot of paper companies that own a lot of land in states like Minnesota. They are (or were) thinking about selling off huge tracts of land since they thought it was more valuable for real estate. This has a lot of people worried who don't want to see that sort of change. Right or wrong, good or bad, like it or not, it's not going to be the same. I would like to own a few 1000 acres, but I ain't got that kind of scratch.

i think it's important to remember that stuff like this is exactly that which political think tanks are supposed to do––explore concepts of governance. i'm always going to come up on the side of water as a public trust, but there has to be some counterpoint to that idea––otherwise we creep into intellectual and policy stagnation. it's sorta their job to take things to an extreme, so that we can understand the full spectrum of the issue and meet on more rational turf somewhere in the middle.

some people (*cough* maude barlow *cough*) think that any privatization of any water is downright evil (as in the fru-its of the dev-il)––that the government is a bunch of angels who will solve all our problems. i think we all know how dumb that idea is at a practical level. but with some thought, we can just as easily see how predatory that commercial enterprises can be. the solution, i think, is public-private partnerships, which act as counterweights for each other.

I think in Misouri the law states that you can own the land under the river, but the water itself is public and state owned.

Probably not, and even though some laws I will disregard because I feel they're unjust, I'm not going to risk all of my fishing tackle, my fishing license for this year and possibly years to come, and probably even my hunting rights for some fish fillets. It would take a real dick of a DNR officer to do all that over some barely undersized privately owned fish, but I like fishing and hunting far too much to risk that. I'll get a fish fillet at the drive through on the way home from fishing instead.

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