Rick Santorum said something interesting recently about privatizing public land:

But there’s a lot of land out there that…can and should be managed by stewards who care about that land. I believe the land is there to serve man, not man there to serve the land. The federal government doesn’t care about it, they don’t care about this land. They don’t live here, they don’t care about it, we don’t care about it in Washington. It’s just flyover country for most of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

We need to get it back into the hands of the states and even to the private sector. And we can make money doing it, we can make money doing it by selling it. So I believe that this is critically important [Source].

Now I can definitely agree with the sentiment that public lands could be better managed by those with a direct connection to it, do not think for a minute that he, or Ron Paul, or whomever else tries to employ this pseudo-populist rhetoric is sincere in that particular aspect of it. They are trying to appropriate the “control of the people,” democratic populism that has become slightly more acceptable of late into the economic fallacy that privatization is putting something under democratic control, because the market is democratic - even though privatization would put land that at least in theory belonged to the people under control of corporations that would use it exclusively for profit. It’s actually really clever doublespeak. 

A lot of public land, the individual state likely cannot afford to manage on its own. The strategy here is that, without any federal help, States will have no choice but to sell the land to private interests anyway. What’s telling is that the “critically important” part is the part about making money - not for the state by selling it (because it’s really only a short-term investment), but for the private entities that invest in it.

The sickeningly ironic part of this quote, though, is the “land is there to serve man, not man there to serve land,” which happens to be the whole reason we have public land in the first place. It’s so people can make use of it without being exploited (of course, in keeping with right wing rhetoric, “man” likely means “profit” or “property owners” and not, you know, people). It is when land is privately owned for a profit that “man serves land,” because it is then that people who work the land - and especially the people who lose the land to a private entity without their consent - sacrifice and toil for said entity’s accumulation of property.

Why do you think people revolt when their governments sell public or collectively-owned land to private interests (see: Chiapas, Wukan Revolts)? It’s surely not because they themselves are given more control and benefit.