Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?
mattstoller.substack.com
mattstoller.substack.com
We recently had (lost) an ugly battle over the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area in Las Vegas, which proposed and later adopted the Booz Allens reservations system under rec.gov.
During the comment period, the overwhelming opinion of the community here was the reservation fee itself was not the issue, rather it was the fact that the fee does absolutely no good for the park itself.
I personally spend 1-2 days every week in the park for ~5-6 months of year rock climbing. Every year now I pay $30 to the park for the annual pass, and nearly $80 (1.5 times a week over 26 weeks) directly to Booz Allen. It's a tragedy that this money couldn't be going back to the park and put to good use; instead I'm paying for a C-suite exec's raise and some pretty UX on a reservation site.
Now, they absolutely suck at delivering, and everyone who has to deal with their consultants on the job hates them and thinks they’re useless, but they definitely know how to play the game.
But the underlying tone is that more and more people are visiting national parks. Which requires more infrastructure, wich in turn has more administrative overhead.
I spend a lot of time outdoors. If you're like me and don't like fees or permits or crowds. There are millions of acres ran by the forest service that have no amenities, that you can drive/walk into and simply get lost.
1: https://www.fs.usda.gov/ivm/
2: https://webmaps.blm.gov/program_apps/BLM_Natl_Recreation_Opp...
There's nothing specialized about running national parks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30126118
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/27/irs-fac...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-01-20/cybersecu...
I get that you are trying to make a normative statement of how you think things should work, but it doesn't help to deny the reality you live in.
I'm open to the idea that a different model of land rights would lead to different outcomes, after all, how couldn't it. however, I am not so sure that government ownership of all land would have the positive outcomes you do, at least not in terms of affordability. Would everyone be subject to eviction from their homes by a higher bidder? What happens to homes people built and improvements they have made when they are evicted?
What if those most able to pay high land rent are corporate land lords who can most effectively extract wealth from tenants?
You're right, those are all legitimate issues that would have to be addressed carefully. A key part of that would be redistribution of the revenues to the people.
My understanding of Georgism is that the revenue would be used to support the government services.
Is there a subset of Georgism which focuses on the redistributive element?
My main concern with Georgism + redistribution is that I think it would generate a feedback loop where the government captures all production value, not dissimilar to Marxism.
What I mean by "rights" are those that are taken to be so by common consensus - e.g. those in the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes the right to life; to deny someone shelter is to threaten that right.
To withhold shelter from people and then rent it back to them is a racket, plain and simple: safety in return for money, underwritten by a threat of violence.
I thought the whole deal with this society thing was a collective endeavour for the common good; structures that hold private interest above common good seem blatantly counter-productive.
If you take the view that rights are granted by society, then money, law, and property rights DO exist.
I get that you are saying that you want something, but it doesn't exist in either the current defacto social sense, or in inherent moral sense.
>I thought the whole deal with this society thing was a collective endeavor for the common good; structures that hold private interest above common good seem blatantly counter-productive.
I think this is where your position differs with mine, and that, and that generally held by world. Society is not and has never been a collective endeavor for the common good. It is merely a system to prevent people from murdering each other, enslaving them, and taking their things. In one sense, the common good is served in that it prevents lawless anarchy, but few societies have ever bought into the utilitarian view where maximizing the common good is the primary goal.
“This article is badly misinformed on a key point. Booz didn't receive anything upfront to set up recreation.gov. They funded the upfront costs out of their own pocket, and in return they stuck a deal with the US Gov't to collect a per-transaction fee to recover those costs (as well as cover ongoing maintenance and administration). The quoted figure of $182 million is their estimated revenue over the 10-year term of the contract, not an upfront payment. You may not like that arrangement, and maybe you think it was corrupt, but you don't have to misrepresent it.”
So realistically what’s happening is that if BLM or whoever set up the site and maintained it, they would have had higher base fees to close the budget gap. Now if the fee is higher with BAH running things that would be a good reason to maybe not structure things in such a way on future contracts, but I’m not convinced it is meaningfully so.
This is also a downstream consequence of never raising tax revenue while starving out budget lines that aren’t DoD. I’m not like a BAH fanboy or whatever but they’re a distant consequence of a system of government that doesn’t tax (or even enforce tax) appropriately on its richest members.