Showdown In Wyoming Over Gas (property rights)

If that sounds like a far-fetched nightmare, it isn't. As Correspondent Dan Rather reports, it's perfectly legal out West.

Actually, I don't think it's that uncommon. "Mineral Rights" are defined the same way in Pennsylvania, where coal mining commonly takes place underneath long-established residences (without the "landowner" giving consent or profiting from the mining).

Corruption breeds bad law, I say. What's Wyoming's excuse?

I think that the better question is, why should the government own any private property?

Now you are asking a more fundamental question. By definition, if the Government owns it, it isn't private property. So why does the governmnet own 50% of the land west of the Mississippi?

Some is tied up in military bases. Some in National and State Parks, wildlife, and wilderness areas, and SOme is under water behind a government Dam. It isn't that the government siezed these rights to the minerals from the current owners, it is that the Government kept them when it gave the land away.

I'd say descendants of land-grant holders in the east were screwed even harder when the State or Federal Government took their riparian rights and stole everything they owned from the high water mark to the center of the channel, from fishing rights to mineral rights, to the ability to build a seawall.

So, as crazy as it may seem, I'm not defending government seizure, but the landowners should have known they did or did not have the mineral rights in the first place. Of course, none of this is brought on by people who never owned the mineral rights, have the means of production in their back yard, or just over the hill, and are only getting a very small fraction of the money for surface damages while others profit from the oil or gas. I wonder if the landowner in question is leasing any federal grazing rights? (Yep, the government owns those and leases them in some areas as well, as I am sure someone with your screen name would know).

Should our Government own as much land as it does? I don't think so, but until we all demand that our government reduce that instead of label this wilderness, or that protected, or the other a National Monument, Park, Forest, or Grassland, we won't get very far with reducing those holdings.

In the meantime, the people who have purchased or leased the mineral rights should get what they have paid for, too.

Maybe a more equitable solution would be for the government to have to first offer sale/lease of government owned mineral rights to the surface owner first.

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