This movement, initiated and supported primarily by economists, peaked in the early 1980s. Public ownership of land was inefficient because the administration of the lands was removed from the incentives and discipline of the free market. The case for the transfer of these lands to the private sector was made most strongly for lands managed for commodities (e.g., grazing lands, mineral lands, timber lands), but some also advocated transferring wilderness lands to the private sector, where it, too, would be more efficiently managed. Many of the economists who supported the program were a part of a movement referred to as the New Resource Economics (NRE), which advocated an increased reliance on private property rights and the free market for managing natural resources. Such an approach meshed well with the Reagan Administration's philosophy of free market economics.

The privatization idea moved from theory to practice in...