We have "natural" resources in America. Who owns them ? Who should profit from their sale ? Who should decide if it's legal to even sell them ?
If Lower Slobbovia has an urgent need for widgets, can I just run all over America picking up widgets and export them ? Do I need the land owners permission to pick them up or the governments permission to export them?

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"Some men eventually stumble over the truth but they usually pick themselves up and walk on as if nothing ever happened."
-Winston Churchill

"But though there is no difference in this respect between the best demagogue and the worst, both of them having to present their cases equally in terms of melodrama, there is all the difference in the world between the statesman who is humbugging the people into allowing him to do the will of God, in whatever disguise it may come to him, and one who is humbugging them into furthering his personal ambition and the commercial interests of the plutocrats who own the newspapers and support him on reciprocal terms."
-George Bernard Shaw

I live in Slobbovia! lol

The American people own the Govt, hence the American people own everything on and beneath the soil.

When you speak of naural resources, and Americans owning them, what do you speak of?

Most Americans do not own significant property, or natural resources.

Most Americans outside of NYC own land and minerals.

NYC is too expensive for the poor and middle-class to live nice unless you are servicing Elliot Spitzer.

whoever owns the mineral rights individually or the citizens of the usa, if gvt owned land

I have been secretly buying up all our resources, IN about 400 more years I will own them all. Then you will all bow before Main!!!

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Charles_Main

"Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct."
Thomas Jefferson

"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."
Thomas Jefferson

Coincidentally, a large gas field discovery here in north west Louisiana and east Texas has residents clamoring to be aboard the financial bonanza train in the form of mineral right's leases and royalities.

Many landowners are reaping financial windfalls while some are greatly disappointed although both sit on top of the same Hainesville Shale gas field.

As citizens are finding out, the issue is governed by individual state law.

In Louisiana, no one "owns" the minerals (gas/oil) under the surface but property owners have the right to exploit these minerals themselves or lease that right to bring gas/oil to the surface where ownership is attached to the entity holding the lease and/or property.

Leases are bought for ten years although the lease will remain in effect longer if production is continuing. If there is no production of minerals or no drilling then the lease reverts back to the property owner after ten years.

A property owner can sell the land but retain the mineral rights for ten years or more if production is ongoing.

The developing companies are signing up property owners, so are speculators and the prices are not uniform. The buyers count on property owners not knowing the law and the economics of the situation thus getting the lease for a low cost. For example, the first leases were acquired at $250 per acre now the leases are selling for several thousand per acre. FWIW.

Cheers,