Property rights attract private capital and, with government space programs stagnating, a lunar land rush may be just what we need to get things going again. I'll take a nice parcel near one of the lunar poles, please, with a peak high enough to get year-round sunlight and some crater bottoms deep enough to hold ice.
Reynolds, Glenn Harlan. 2008. "Who Owns the Moon? The Case for Lunar Property Rights." Popular Mechanics (June).
4 comments:
Oh my God, that is crazy! Why the hell would anyone want to go to the moon anyway? I mean sure, send robots to collect moon rocks, but what's there for people other than no atmosphere and extreme temperature swings?
Is this proof that Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds is "luney" tunes? This post has ruined for me Nat King Cole's rendition of "It's Only a Paper Moon." In the mind of law prof. Glenn, the paper may be a deed of conveyance. But it may be worth only the paper it is printed on.
By the way, Popular Mechanics seems not to have looked under the hood of Glenn's submission. A responsible editor would have "mooned" him.
Didn't anybody notice that nobody has the authority to give these property rights? What if Russia decided to sell their own?
I don't have a good source on this, but my memory has it that back in 1986 when the Texas real estate market crashed following the drop in oil prices, thereby triggering the nationwide Savings and Loan crisis in the US, one of the reports of bizarre dealings by Texas realtors who had been funded by the funny money Texas S&Ls was of someone who was selling lots on the moon.
Barkley
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