LonelyConservative: Here’s an interesting article in The New York Times about some western states that are trying to take back land that the federal government now controls. I’ve never understood why the federal government needs to control so much land, so I hope they find some success.
One book explains a lot about the government taking of un-patented lands in the west. It is called The Big Burn by Timothy Egan. The full title is “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America”
The story details the big fire the Northwest US in 1910. How the USFS was a fledgling agency and how Teddy Roosevelt saved the west for all the people in the US. (that’s the propaganda)
From my perspective it shows one of the many uses of “Never let a crisis go to waste” Many people died in the fire and the foresters and liberal Teddy convinced the congress, who at the time wanted nothing to do with federal land ownership, to “save” the country from the citizens basically.
Shortly after that big stretches of the west were grabbed as national forests. By the late 20’s Land Patents (homesteads) were being eliminated and sometime in the 30’s the congress said there would be no more land patents and everything that hadn’t been patented to a citizen of the US is still controlled by the BLM.
One of the reasons why states and counties with a large percentage of federal lands are broke.
A publication called Range is a great magazine that reports on the hell that the ranchers out west deal with daily.
http://www.rangemagazine.com/
Yep. About 2/3s of Utah is Federal land. The state government has been working for a while to pull together the resources, lawyers, precedent, court cases, and money (a fair chunk of change there) to work this through the court system, all the way to SCOTUS if necessary. Good luck to all of us in the west.
Can you imagine the resources locked up on “fed” land, that could be exploited for the state budget? The untethering from the “Fed” tax grab and bribery? The ‘splody heads as the Libtard EnviroNazis see this protected Fed land becomes resource exploited state land?
Range is good stuff. A number of family members have subscriptions.
Unfortunately, our pussy, establishment governor Mead isn’t on board with Utah on this matter.
This situation on this map MUST COME TO AN END:
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341bfae553ef014e6114a014970c-pi
Why any state would allow this theft is beyond me.
I have no faith in Congress supporting state’s rights of the land within their borders or any reduction of Federal Control of waterways, commerce, agriculture, education, transportation, labor or any other regulatory/taxing body.
Big Corrupt Government is Big Business for the power grabbing elite.
Sell all that land and timber, use proceeds to help pay off the national debt.
Cato,
It’s not like “theft” in the usual sense. From what little I understand, when the territories became states, the FedGov held onto a lot of that land, with the promise that after a certain time, and certain conditions being met, the FedGov land would be turned over to the states. The time and conditions have been met, but the FedGov has not lived up to its end of the contract. The states are finally waking up and saying, “enough is enough”.
Naaa, how about we suppress forest fires, stop timber sales and allow the mountain pine beetle to destroy 200 million board feet of lumber. That makes more sense doesn’t it?
Sell all that land and timber (and other resources) and let the states control their own budget (highways and schools are the two biggies that come immediately to mind), instead of begging the FedGov to return a portion of the money extorted through taxes.