Mineral Rights: Who Should Own What’s Under the Ground? Australia Case Study | Yaron Brook Show

Mineral Rights: Who Should Own What’s Under the Ground? Australia Case Study | Yaron Brook Show

(Season 12, Episode 168)

Watch now: https://youtube.com/live/9f2XBrckRO8

Who owns the gas under Australia? Is it 28 million Australians? The Crown? Or the people who spent A$234 billion turning 100 million years of worthless pressure in a rock into cargo bound for Japan?

Australia is one of the world's biggest exporters of natural gas, and Melbourne is still heading for a gas shortage. Yaron Brook argues that the East Coast never ran out of gas. It ran out of permission slips.

In this episode, Yaron Brook takes on one of the oldest assumptions in politics: that what's under the ground belongs to "the nation." Australia's gas fight is the case study. The unions and Greens want a 25% tax on gas exports. The Labor government is passing a rule that forces producers to offer 20% of their exports to Australian buyers. Both proposals start from the same premise, "it's our gas." Yaron argues that premise is wrong.

Ownership requires the ability to use, sell and exclude, and no Australian can do any of those things with "his share" of a gas field. A resource is a thing in the ground plus a mind that knows what to do with it. The people who supplied that mind, and the money and the risk, were Shell, Chevron, Woodside and the Japanese utilities whose 20-year contracts paid for the plants. The state's claim is a leftover from British kings.

Don't miss the live Q&A with Ayn Rand vs. Phil Donahue on Middle Eastern oil and more!

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00:50 Who should own what's under the ground?