Principle of the common heritage of mankind enshrined in UNCLOS makes no moral or practical sense

Even if no minerals are ever lifted commercially from the ocean floor, the Law of the Sea Treaty retains its coercive, collectivist philosophical underpinnings. It will have a negative impact on entrepreneurship even if no mining ever occurs. The worst principle is the declaration that all seabed resources are mankind’s “common heritage” under the control of a majority of the world’s nation states. American ratification would help validate some of these discredited collectivist notions.

Among the precedents enshrined by the LOST is that the nation states—not peoples—of the world, in the words of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Min Mohamad, collectively own “all the unclaimed wealth of this Earth.”¹⁴ Granting ownership and control to Third World autocracies with no relationship to the resource nor any ability to contribute anything to their development makes neither moral nor practical sense.