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Many donors, who believe they are giving funds to the
organization so land can be conserved under its ownership,
are unaware that the Nature Conservancy often sells
land it acquires to the government at a substantial profit.
While nominally funded by private donors, indirectly
the government subsidizes the Nature Conservancy by
knowingly paying well over the Nature Conservancy’s
purchase price for property.
While the Nature Conservancy’s major activity is purchasing
land to conserve it, other environmental organizations,
like the Sierra Club, are designed specifically to
lobby the government for environmental causes—that is,
to use their connections in government to further their
ends. Environmental regulatory bodies in the United
States constitute one of the largest centralized planning
structures that still exist in the modern world. It is therefore
especially worrying that the political economy of
environmental regulation lends itself to cronyism.
This analysis is not intended to indict environmentalism
or environmental groups, any more than an analysis
of crony capitalism is an indictment of capitalism. Rather,
it illustrates that when the government becomes involved
in resource allocation, the political process produces cronyism.
Any time people want to accomplish goals that can
be aided—or hindered—by political intervention, the system
itself pulls people to develop connections to those
who make the decisions, because discretionary decisions
favor those with political connections. Surely the environmental
community did not intend to promote the crony
capitalism that led to subsidies to politically connected
firms—with the Solyndra case being the most visible—
but that was the result of a process that gives the govern-
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