The Statue of Liberty is just sitting there too - it would be far more valuable recycling all that copper and putting it to use. Could there perhaps be another reason we haven't melted it down yet?
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
It's remarkable how people forget how we all got here.
The US makes a several orders of magnitude more money from the Statue of Liberty where it is than they would get from its scrap value.
Could it? We can measure the cash flow the Statue of Liberty produces relative to its commodity value. A pristine deep sea certainly has value. But it's difficult to argue that every square inch of it is more valuable than the commodities on and below it. Particularly when you start trading off extraction there against terrestrial mining.
Make the difference.
Because it was gift. It was supported in the US locally by donations, but it was conceived and built in France as a gift to a younger nation.