Look, Milton Friedman made a joke!

The folks at the conservative "think-tank" called the Heritage Foundation thought it'd be a hoot to run this Friedman quip. "See, the government sucks so hard, we'd run out of sand if they were in charge of it. LOL!"

But as Matthew Yglesias points out over at Slate:

...the federal government IS the major landowner in arid Southwestern states. Over 80 percent of Nevada is federally owned, along with 48 percent of Arizona, 42 percent of New Mexico, 57 percent of Utah, and 45.3 percent of California. There is no shortage of sand in these federally owned areas. In fact the landscapes are often quite beautiful. Now it's not as though Friedman's underlying point here about government ownership, lack of market prices, and allocative distortions is totally crazy... But to point that out would have challenged the self-conceptions of a lot of politically conservative Westerners, who imagine themselves hardy freedom-lovers but are in fact freeloaders on massive government subsidies to the rural economy.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand.