Mr. Sowell argues that the federal government’s massive holdings of land are an anomalous and wasteful feature of the U.S. economic system, and that most of these lands should be privatized. I agree, and so did the nation’s founders. To a man, they saw the public domain as a way to generate revenue to discharge the public debt. One of the first acts of Congress during George Washington’s presidency, passing the Public Debt Act of 1790, was designed to do just that.

Until the Civil War, things went according to the Founders’ wishes. Land sales were a major source of federal revenue. At their peak in 1836, revenue from land sales accounted for 48% of federal revenue. Eventually, the disposal of publicly owned lands petered out with the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934.

During his first term, President Ronald Reagan launched a program to sell federal lands and use the revenue to discharge the public debt. I was assigned the task of designing the program and made public my recommendations in a speech, “Privatize Those Lands,” which I delivered in September 1981 at a meeting of the Public Lands Council in Reno, Nevada, a state in which 80.1% of the land is owned by the federal government. Reagan formally endorsed the push to privatize when he signed Executive Order 12348 on Feb. 25, 1982.

Thanks to the U.S. Congress, however, Reagan’s embrace of the Founding Fathers’ vision of what to do with the public domain, an asset that generates huge negative cashflows, was stillborn. About the only thing we accomplished was to enter the French word “privatize” into Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary in the 1983 ninth edition.

Let’s hope the Trump administration has better luck at shrinking the federal government’s balance sheet.

Prof. Steve H. Hanke

Johns Hopkins University

Baltimore