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fee. A commercial fisher must pay a substantial license fee. A company mining for coal, oil, or gas must pay royalties to the government. Only in the case of water and hardrock minerals is no fee required. Second, the state and federal governments not only allowed free appropriation of western water, they also sub- sidized development through a multi-billion-dollar dam and canal building program in which the United States recovered only a small fraction of the cost. The states participated by establishing special water districts, such as the conservancy districts, that subsidized private water development through tax- exempt bonds, revenue-raising authority, and other mechanisms. Third, water users have imposed extensive costs on other private users and on the public in the form of various forms of water pollution, but water developers have almost never been held accountable for these externalities. It needs to be underscored that this far-flung program of subsidized, laissez faire development of western resources was probably a good thing for its time, even if it did depart from market principles and even if it did favor private development to the near-total exclusion of any public interest as we conceive of it today. The country needed water projects. It needed to hold out hope to people in the East who wanted to head out over the horizon toward a new start. Strong measures were needed and they worked, at least in the sense that they were necessary and appropriate to fulfilling the government's clearly-enunciated policy to open the American West for settlement by non-Indians and to develop a true coast-to-coast economy and society. -4-