No. And along with the land, they’ve locked up all natural resources. Can you imagine if the federal government had locked up all the natural resources in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee or Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, etc? For one thing, the industrial revolution would never had happened. And another, America would never had been the land of plentiful or the richest most powerful country on earth.
49 posted on 4/22/2014 3:05:59 PM by Ben Ficklin: “But out in the western deserts nobody wanted that land. Nevada has the most federal land because it has more desert than any other state. If its free I'll take it, but only if you give me low cost grazing on this other 15,000 acres.”
Jim, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Ben Ficklin’s point is that this situation of massive federal retention of land ownership in the West happened because, until relatively recently, nobody wanted the land. Most of it wasn't useful for much of anything, and with open range laws, having private ownership of hundreds of thousands of minimally productive acres of grass for grazing wasn't necessary, wasn't helpful, and due to fencing problems and winter/summer pasture issues, may not even have been possible in many places.
Letting homesteaders purchase relatively small parcels of land on which they would build their homes and barns and make improvements, while letting them use mostly unwanted land for grazing, made sense when the federal government wasn't interested in hassling ranchers. It was probably a good deal for all involved.
But by letting the federal government retain so much land, it opened the door to abuse.
We're now seeing the door open and smack long-time users on their rear ends. That is wrong and something needs to be done about it. Clearly we can no longer trust the federal government to act in the best interests of rural residents who have lived on the land for generations.
But fixing the problem is easier said than done. Governments do not typically give up power once they have gotten used to exercising it, and while a wholesale transfer of federal land to state authority might work well in many Western states, I hardly think it would produce positive results in places like California. As bad as federal bureaucrats can be, there's a better chance of Congress calling them to account than the California legislature doing so.