John Malone, like Ted Turner a cowboy-hat-wearing cable TV pioneer, has vaulted past Turner's 2 million acres to become America's biggest landowner with 2.2 million acres. He says real estate "is a pretty decent hedge on the devaluation of currency" and that now is the time to buy land "because of low borrowing costs and land prices."
Some might worry that Mr. Malone's purchase may ease America back to its more feudal days when the rich owned most of the land. Environmentalists fret about an era of “Kingdom Buyers.” Others may see them as the most responsible long-term stewards. Either way, the wealthy are likely to continue looking at large tracts of land as the safest long-term, hard assets at a time of extreme market volatility and low borrowing costs.
Do you think the wealthy will be good land stewards?
They're more likely than the government to be good stewards. When I read about environmentalists being upset about something happening on a certain tract of land, it so often seems to be government-owned rather than privately held land. People tend to take better care of their own stuff than they do other people's stuff. One reason people out West seem to be bigger anti-government activists than those in the rest of the country is that they're fighting against the landlord. It's shocking how much land the federal government owns -- 84.5 percent of Nevada, 57.4 percent of Utah, 53.1 percent of Oregon. The federal government has direct ownership of almost 650 million acres, nearly 30 percent of our total territory. And when you throw in all the land owned by state and local governments (which is difficult to quantify since most don't even have inventories), I'd say feudalism is the last thing we need to worry about.
