Economists that believe everything can be sorted out in the free market are pretty fringe.
You can't take your wealth with you upon death -- Property owners of valuable resources nearly always maximize exploitation in the short term and could give a shit about the long term.
If they took a long term view, we'd still have old growth forest in the US.
The statement was heavily sarcastic.
Not caring for the long term is still a massive problem for our civilization. I don't know if that has anything to do with privatization. I'm very skeptical that governments or voters care more about the long term than private markets. At least individuals care about leaving money for retirement. And even if you don't care, it's still senseless to deprecate your assets' value more than you gain from exploiting it.
They wouldn't completely own them, they'd have property rights in them. Depending on how the property rights are structured you could have many owners of say a lake or a river.
> Those private entities would rationally take a long term vision
If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s
An unregulated free market is a terrible idea. It ends in massive monopolies and natural resource destruction at an absolute level.
It's not a bad thing that that's what a free market moves towards, per se, but that's why it needs to be and is regulated. Any worthwhile conversation isn't about whether or not to regulate it, it's a what level.
There's certainly merit in trying to make people pay for externalities (offsetting carbon pollution for example), but you can't do that for everything. Privatizing everything might be an appealing free-market pipe dream, but unless we can completely/mostly stop externalities from happening, such an experiment would be a disaster.