ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of the 1970s, the production and distribution of raw materials have become subjects of intense public debate and scholarly analysis in the United States. Part of this attention has been caused by the "energy crisis" and by the sudden realization that it brought of the nonrenewable nature of once-plentiful domestic minerals. Throughout the history of the United States, raw materials have been considered to be private rather than public goods. Underground mineral rights are not automatically the property of the federal government, as in most major mineral-producing countries, or of the states and provinces, as in the case of Canada, but rather belong to the owner of the surface land under which the minerals are found. The right to levy severance taxes on mineral production from private lands is reserved to the individual states in the US system, and virtually all mineral-producing states have enacted such taxes.
