Some advocates of the LOST have argued that a universal accord would promote seabed mining. A truly market-oriented accord might do so; not, however, a system that includes the ISA, the Enterprise, the Council, revenue sharing, international royalties, Western subsidies for the Enterprise, a Council veto for land-based minerals producers, and the like. Yet all of those anti-development provisions remain in the revised text.

That the treaty would favor political over productive activity should come as no surprise. The LOST was created in a different era. It was intended to inaugurate large and sustained wealth transfers from the industrialized states. The structure was therefore crafted to advance ideological, not economic, goals. Since then, however, most developing states have moved away from collectivism, and the promise of undersea mining has largely evaporated. Yet the original collectivist framework remains. Even the State Department acknowledges that the new "agreement retains the institutional outlines of Part XI," which contains the seabed mining provisions.¹⁰ The treaty has become a solution in search of a problem.

This redistributionist, collectivist language, I’ve suggested, is archaic and this is not surprising. The treaty was drafted during the height of the G-77 – when many saw world poverty as the result of the west’s wealth. People in Africa, Asia, and South America were poor because we were rich; make us poorer and they will become richer! In that era, only foreign aid and other wealth redistribution schemes were viewed as offering any hope of alleviating world poverty. LOST was typical of the flawed policy prescriptions of that era. But the world has learned much over the last decades. Most now recognize that Foreign Aid, while occasionally useful in emergency relief situations, can too often stifle the entrepreneurial forces and political reforms which offer the only hope for sustainable economic growth. The work of Lord Peter Bauer, recipient of the Cato Institute Friedman Prize, showed that too often foreign aid is simply the transfer of wealth from the poor in the rich world to the rich in the poor world, that such wealth transfer programs hurt, rather than helped the poor. LOST was crafted in this era and it shows. Even the World Bank and its other international institutions increasingly recognize that the key to addressing poverty is for the affected nation states to move toward economic freedom, private property, a predictable rule of law, a reduction in domestic violence. To enshrine collective political management of the oceans does nothing to advance this cause.