Posted on 04/21/2014 12:06:35 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
He may be a clown, but his actions raise a question: Who is the state to determine who gets to use what resources?
Clive Bundy’s property rights dispute with the federal government appears now to be over. For those unaware, basically this rancher wanted to graze cattle on federally owned land without paying the grazing fee, due to some strange legal theory that the land was really his. The spectacle generated an obscene amount of commentary to which I am guiltily adding here. I wouldn’t be adding any commentary to it except that all of the analysis I read on it seems to have missed the mark.
More than anything else to have gotten this much attention in a long time, what the Bundy saga shows us is that property ownership is a purely governmental construct. The allocation of resources in this country is done by government-imposed institutions, most especially through the biggest government programs in history: property and contract law. At its root, the Bundy dispute is not about who owns the land. We already know who owns it because the law is pretty clear. It is about who gets to decide the question in the first place.
In essence, Bundy’s actions challenge everyone to ask themselves: Who is the state to determine who gets to use what resources? Or, alternatively, why should we think that the way the state has currently determined that question is the correct one?
Bundy is a clown whose particular pleas are totally unsympathetic, though his identity presentation triggers the right tribal signals, causing political blocs to churn in predictable ways. But the basic idea of challenging property laws in this way is not a new one and the question of how to create our scarcity allocation institutions is a perpetual one.
Before Bundy, for instance, we had the civil rights movement and its famed sit-ins. Among other things, those sit-ins were straightforwardly challenging the state’s construction of property law in such a way that empowers certain people to exclude others from places based upon their racist whims (whims that the state enforces with its police, as the sit-in participants experienced quite directly). More recently, efforts to prohibit anti-gay discrimination in public accommodations present a similar protest, arguing that our statist property law institutions should not operate so as to keep people out of certain places because of their sexual orientation.
These kinds of property law challenges even pop up in very mundane places. The New York Times reported in January of this year about a property law dispute between a McDonald’s in Queens and a group of elderly people. The elderly people believed that they should be allowed to sit in the McDonald’s for as long as they want, while the McDonald’s proprietor thought they should be limited. The violent state made the property law decision that the elderly must go and have started to kick them out for staying too long. But, like Cliven Bundy, they are reported to be bucking the state’s property law institutions as best they can by leaving when the police force them to, circling the block, and then buying something else and sitting back down.
From Bundy, to sit-ins, to anti-discrimination battles, to elderly patrons who really want to hang out in McDonald’s, these are all the same kind of dispute. The state creates laws that determine who can use what, when, where and how. And sometimes people disagree with those statist property laws and think they should be reconfigured along other lines.
The biggest mistake we can make when talking about these kinds of things is to act like the question of how to construct our scarcity allocation institutions is one of fact. It’s not. It’s not truly the case that Bundy is in the right or that the federal government is in the right, as if there is some kind of objective determination to be made on the matter. Who gets to use that land is totally made up and we can make it up however we want. The same is true over who gets to use any other piece of the world that resides within the borders of this nation.
Ultimately, I find Bundy’s claim wrong, not because it is against the law, but because I’d much rather he pay rent on the land (which, by the way, nobody makes) than have him capture the unearned windfall of land rents at the expense of everyone else. But I applaud the basic idea that we should be rethinking our economic institutions and whether they are actually serving us the way they ought to. When 75 percent of the things in this country are controlled by 10 percent of the people, I’d say they aren’t serving us well. And like Bundy, I’d be up for some civil disobedience against the statist property institutions that create and enforce that disparity as well.
Nothing is real. It is whatever you want or imagine it to be. You can be a rainbow colored unicorn.
Bundy should sue the shill who wrote this swill.
Thanks 2ndDivisionVet.
If you can, please post this on Salon. I don’t know if you have to create an account or want to. But on the heels of Salon “trying” to be objective or libertarian, it would be good for their audience to see. (Some of them anyway).
I thought that the states had original jurisdiction. It is the states that delegated powers to the federal government, not the other way around.
If there is a "correct" view, it is the state's view.
-PJ
Well, yes to a point. Question authority, but by that, I mean question the authority of governmetn bureaucrats…..not question the authority of property owners on their own property. That is the distinction that this author conflates.
Though he did start off on the right path….
I bet he spends a lot of time in pajamas.
With the back door open.
If this were private property, he would have a valid claim to ownership. We all know the courts are open to the claims of a squatter sitting on personal property.
Why would anyone want to read anything posted on Salon?
It’s like trying to find news and insight in the New York Times. Not gonna happen.
I think a better analogy may be something like this.
You own a property. A farm, for example, surrounded by property that has been acquired by the government.
Your historical access to and from your land and the Highway (about six miles) cuts through this now “Government Property”.
The government says “no problem” we will allow you access since you were here first. Later they say, “no problem” as long as you follow our rules. You comply since the rules don’t seem too unreasonable.
Then they decide that you need to pay for that access and follow their rules. You comply since the rules and fees don’t seem too unreasonable.
Then they change the rules again. Now, in order to get on and off your property, to go to work, you are no longer allowed to drive a motor vehicle and the only transportation allowed is a bicycle or by foot.
You refuse. You refuse to sign a contract and paying the fee is acceptance of the contract and the terms/rules.
They contend that they are not restricting your “Historical access”, never mind that to gain access to and from your property it will take two hours by foot where as driving would take 5 minutes.
What would you do ?
Just a thought.
If we only posted stories from Red State, EIB, the Blaze, National Review and Hot Air it would look like a ghost town here.
He makes it all the way through one sentence before coughing up a furball of ignorance. Bundy does not claim the land as his own; his claim is that it is Nevada’s land and that he has paid Nevada appropriately.
This is at least arguably supported by Article 1, Section 8, which says something along the lines of federal lands should be used for forts, armories, “and the like” — “for grazing” is not “and the like” by no stretch of the imagination.
For those unaware, basically this rancher wanted to graze cattle on federally owned land without paying the grazing fee, due to some strange legal theory that the land was really his.
Wrong. I don't recall him ever claiming the lands were 'his', but that the rights to graze were and predated the BLM.
The phrasing also asserts that Bundy refuses to pay the fees, which is a lie, as he offered to pay the fees to the State of Nevada, which refused them, in the wake of his permit getting revoked in 1994 for non-payment.
It's also my understanding that the BLM wanted Bundy to give up rights in signing the new permit, in addition to limiting grazing to 150 head, which is why he offered instead to pay the fees to the State, as this same tactic is what they used to force out the other ranchers. Coupled with others, Breitbart has a decent write up of this
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/04/12/The-Saga-of-Bundy-Ranch
and I wish I could verify some aspects of this
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/04/19/do-the-feds-really-own-the-land-in-nevada-nope/
The left is alive in repeating lie after lie on the web.
Are they doing this in MSM news, too? I'm disconnected from that...if dingy harry's statements are any clue, I'm betting they probably are.
I avoid those lefty sites because my blood pressure is good and I’m trying to keep it that way...LOL
I have to say, 2ndDivisionVet, I appreciate (and read) your many posts here on FR. A++
Well, it’s always nice to see the COMMUNIST perspective where is there no PRIVATE PROPERTY.
Don’t worry about it, the guy’s just a douchbag punk wannabe lefty “journalist. Don’t waste your time.
It's 28%. And it's 50% of the 13 western states, 84% of Nevada.
Article 1 Section 8 Paragraph 27 limits the amount of land the Federal Government can own in any one state to 10 square miles.
You can always tell when a lib writes something by their overuse of the word “construct.”
“Construct” this, clown.
Wow! He get the Alinsky “Isolate and mock” strategy out of the way in the first 5 words of the story! Good for him...
I think part of the story is that he was paying grazing fees with the basic contract being the Feds would use it for upkeep and whatnot so he could keep grazing. Instead they collaberated with enviros to do the opposite, as well as force him to run fewer and fewer cattle for those same fees, among other things.
At some point I’d stop paying too if there was that kind of breach of contract.
The other things you mentioned are spot on.
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