158 The Political Economy of Resource Use 



source in the direction of the future," ^ we have a set of issues that can 

 be analyzed, but one which represents only a small part of the tradi- 

 tional concern of conservationists. Rather than waste time at this junc- 

 ture in the fruitless search for a definition that will both hospitably 

 embrace the various views of conservationists, and at the same time 

 represent a meaningful statement of a specific issue, I prefer to lay 

 out a number of unresolved problems in what I have chosen to call 

 the political economy of natural resource use. 



My choice of "political economy" rather than economics obviously 

 reflects a predilection for issues in the area of public policy. The term 

 "problem" is here used in a public action context. Given a competitive 

 price system in a free enterprise economy, will the use of natural re- 

 sources roughly correspond to the use that, over time, will give the 

 community the goods and services it might reasonably expect to have 

 from these resources? If "laissez faire," or an unfettered price system, 

 tends to produce conspicuous wastes in the use of resources there is, 

 in my use of the word, a "problem," whose solution may require pub- 

 lic intervention. The four areas I have chosen for discussion are all 

 areas in which government intervention has, in fact, been extensive. 

 Whether intervention has been, or is, justified in the public interest or 

 whether it represents merely the pressure of special interests is, of 

 course, the principal question at issue. Since these four areas cover a 

 substantial part of what may properly be called the political economy 

 of natural resource use, the treatment I propose to give them is, per- 

 force, extensive rather than intensive. 



1 . It is argued that a market determination of prices is unlikely to 

 produce an adequate investment in the discovery and development of 

 new sources of mineral supply. It is a fact that the practice of offering 

 incentives to the discovery of new mineral deposits goes back at least 

 to the Middle Ages and that most, if not all, of the mineralized coun- 

 tries of the world currently subsidize, through tax or other incentives, 

 mineral discovery. Is there anything in the unimpeded functioning of 

 the price system that tends to produce an undesirably low investment 

 in the discovery and development of mineral deposits and, conse- 

 quently, justifies governmental subsidy of discovery operations? 



^ S. V. Ciriacy Wantrup, Resource Conservation (Berkeley: University of 

 California Press, 1952), p. 51. 



