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Great article here:

Native American reservations: America’s failed Socialist experiment

Posted by ReaganGirl in Economy, Native Americans, Socialism

September 19, 2016
Native American Reservations: “Socialist Archipelago”

Andrei Znamenski
Mises Institute Daily

Imagine a country that has a corrupt authoritarian government. In that country no one knows about checks and balances or an independent court system. Private property is not recognized in that country either. Neither can one buy or sell land. And businesses are reluctant to bring investments into this country. Those who have jobs usually work for the public sector. Those who don’t have jobs subsist on entitlements that provide basic food. At the same time, this country sports a free health care system and free access to education. Can you guess what country it is? It could be the former Soviet Union, Cuba, or any other socialist country of the past.

Yet, I want to assure you that such a country exists right here in the United States. And its name is Indian Country. Indian Country is a generic metaphor that writers and scholars use to refer to the archipelago of 310 Native American reservations, which occupy 2 percent of the U.S. soil. Scattered all over the United States, these sheltered land enclaves are held in trust by the federal government. So legally, many of these land enclaves are a federal property. So there you cannot freely buy and sell land or use it as collateral. On top of this, since the Indian tribes are wards of the federal government, one cannot sue them for breach of contract. Indian reservations are communally used by Indian groups and subsidized by the BIA (the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior) with a current annual budget of about $3 billion dollars. Besides being a major financial resource that sustains the reservation system, BIA’s goal is also to safeguard indigenous communities, or, in other words, to make sure that they would never fail when dealing with the “outside” society. People in the government and many Native American leaders naÏvely believe that it is good for the well-being of the Indians to be segregated and sheltered from the rest of American society.

This peculiar trust status of Indian Country, where private property rights are insecure, scares away businesses and investors.1 They consider these forbidden grounds high risk areas. So, in Indian Country, we have an extreme case of what Robert Higgs famously labeled “regime uncertainty” that retards economic development.2 In fact, this “regime uncertainty” borders on socialism. James Watt, Secretary of the Interior in the first Reagan administration, was the first to publicly state this. In 1983, he said (and then dearly paid for this), “If you want an example of the failure of socialism, don’t go to Russia, come to America and go to the Indian reservations.”3...

Read at:

http://reagangirl.com/native-american-reservations-americas-failed-socialist-experiment/