Earlier this week, Nobelist Vernon L. Smith penned an important piece, "Trump's Best Deal Ever: Privatize the Interstate," which was published in The Wall Street Journal. Smith correctly argued that the Trump administration should expand the scope of its privatization efforts to include the Federal government's vast holdings of commercial public lands.

Unfortunately, President Trump's Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, is dead set against privatization. Indeed, during his confirmation hearings, Zinke said, "I am absolutely against transfer or sale of public lands."

Zinke's misguided views bring back an echo from the past: President Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and Sagebrush Rebel James Watt. Fortunately, Reagan the intellectual slapped Watt down and fully embraced the idea of privatizing public lands. Whether Trump will take Zinke to the woodshed remains to be seen.

ADVERTISING

Let's take a closer look at Reagan the intellectual and the case for privatizing public lands. A true intellectual conveys to the public new ideas on a wide range of subjects, unearthing these notions long before most people do. That is the essence of Nobelist Friedrich von Hayek's definition of an intellectual. In his 1949 University of Chicago Law Review essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism," Hayek also underlined that for better or worse, intellectuals are more important than most people think. After all, they shape public opinion.

Austrian economist Hayek was one of Ronald Reagan's favorite thinkers. And Reagan, by Hayek's definition, was an intellectual. Reagan the intellectual? The book Reagan, In His Own Hand answers that question. This volume, with an illuminating preface by George Shultz, contains 259 essays Reagan wrote in his own hand, mainly scripts for his five minute, five-day-a-week syndicated radio broadcasts in the late 1970s. The essays were Reagan's own handy work, not material written by his staff. And they laid out the philosophical framework for his presidency.