By Ryan Wardle

Senator Mike Lee has been making waves recently with his support of new potential legislation that would mandate sale of a small amount of land which is currently owned and managed by the federal government. The idea behind the proposal is to free up space for housing development in states where the federal government currently owns large shares of the land. In Senator Lee’s words, “…turning federal liabilities into taxpayer value.”

The appeals made in support of this proposed legislation correctly identify a number of key issues. For one, it is obviously true that any federally-owned land which currently serves no productive purpose would be transformed from a liability into an economic asset if its sale were to result in new productivity. It is also true that the housing market in the Western part of the country could benefit from freeing up some of the government-owned land for development. Utah—Senator Lee’s home state—has seen a continual and substantial increase in housing prices over several decades. There is little doubt that this rise in price is to some degree a result of the fact that roughly 68 percent of Utah’s land is owned by the federal government, preventing its utilization in the meeting of demand for housing in the state.

If one were to consider only these two factors—the current under-utilization of some portion of federally-controlled land together with the immediately apparent possible use case for that same land—putting the land up for sale and allowing the unseen hand of the free market to figure out how best to use it seems like a perfect solution. But the problem with the proposal is not in the idea that in a free market the voluntary exchange of........

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