How The Feds Got All That Western Land (and Why It's A Problem)
Submitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Government owned and subsidized lands in the American West have been a source of conflict among competing interest groups since the 19th century. Since the very beginning of white settlement, lands have been used by the federal government as part of a political scheme to subsidize and reward certain groups while punishing others.
The current standoff between ranchers and federal officials in Oregon is simply the latest chapter in a long contentious and sometimes bloody history of groups competing for control over government-owned lands in the West, and by ensuring that lands continue to be allocated by political means rather than through the market, government ownership of lands simply perpetuates conflict in the region.
The Origins of Government Ownership in the West
Why is it that so much land is controlled by the federal government in Western states in contrast to the rest of the county?
The troubles initially began with the Louisiana Purchase which established the federal government as the direct administrator of immense amounts of non-state land. However, the ideological justification for permanent federal ownership really began to gain influence by the late 19th century as many Americans, including influential economists of the time, began to adopt ideologies that saw centralized government as necessary for regulating the economy. We see these ideological leanings in the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 which was initially created to regulate the railroads. Over time, the ICC became the inspiration for a host of other federal regulatory agencies that began to appear by the early 20th century.
As with the railroads, land in the west began to be seen as a "public resource" that required federal regulation as well.
But ideology was just one factor. The widespread nature of federal lands can also be attributed to mere administrative, historical, and geographic accidents that led to an expansion of federal land ownership well beyond what anyone had expected.
First of all was the fact of Indian settlement on Western lands. It may strike many as hard to believe, but the treatment of the Indian tribes west of the Mississippi was actually more restrained than it had been in Eastern states.
In earlier generations, for example, Indian settlements were completely destroyed with all the inhabitants killed or forcibly removed to locations west of the Mississippi. In other words, the tribes of the east were more completely decimated than were many tribes further West.
Much of this is due to the fact that whites populated the West more slowly and in smaller numbers than in, say, the Great Lakes area, but some of it is also due to the fact that the tribes often received better treatment from federal troops than they did from the ad hoc local militias they encountered in the Eastern states.
This is why Kit Carson saw his U.S. Army work in forcing Indians onto reservations as a "humanitarian" mission. Based on experiences in the east (and in early West Coast settlements), Carson surmised that the Indian tribes of the west would be completely destroyed if left to the "mercy" of locally based militias.
Over time — and contrary to past efforts of this sort — the removal of the tribes to reservations came to be dominated by the federal government. With this came what were effectively federally owned reservations. Legally, the reservations were sovereign lands guaranteed by the law of treaties. But the reality of US military domination meant the lands were really federal lands.
The Overrated Homestead Act
At the same time the federal government was moving the tribes onto reservations, it was attempting to encourage settlement by whites on those same lands. This was important to the federal government for military reasons. It was important to the federal government that whites with an allegiance to the US settle the lands instead of, say, Canadians or Mexicans, and it was important toward making sure that the Indians did not attempt to re-settle the land.
The Homestead program was also a clever welfare scheme that provided nearly-free land to new settlers who were paying nowhere near what the cost of acquiring the land had actually been. The taxpayers back East had already covered much of the immense cost of Indian removal and infrastructure construction. The new homesteaders paid but a small fraction of this cost. But from the federal government's perspective, it was worth it since the cheap land meant pro-American settlers were keeping others out.
The homestead act is often romanticized and praised by free-market types, but it should not be. The Homestead program was, ultimately, a federal land redistribution scheme, and it worked about as well as anyone skeptical of federal competence might expect. It also further expanded the role of the federal government.
Homesteading, as defined by federal law, worked relatively well in places like eastern Kansas or in the eastern Dakotas where it still rained enough to allow for crops without irrigation.
Further west — west of the 100th meridian — things were much drier, and the small acreage plots dictated by the Homestead Act made very little sense. Not surprisingly, Congress had written laws without bothering to check to see if they made any sense in light of geographic realities.
With so little water out west, and with fragile ecosystems that could not support anywhere near the agricultural population density that the Homestead Act envisioned, conflicts quickly arose over resources. Devastating boom-bust cycles like the Great Dakota Boom took shape in which new settlers flooded new lands only to find that they could not make a living on such small plots and with so little water. The lands were later abandoned.
In the wake of these new realities came rampant fraud in which large wealthy interests bent or broke the law to acquire large swaths of land that had been intended for small-scale settlement. Water rights became frequent bones of contention, and all the while, federal intervention became the tool of competing special interests who used federal power to gain lands and water rights for themselves.
The Spread of "Public" Lands
As it became clear that it was impossible to impose the eastern settlement model on the west, politicians and activists continued to cling to the idea that land ownership should still consist of only small parcels, even when such a plan made no sense at all in arid lands with sparse grass.
As a Plan B, the feds began to encourage the use of "open range" and the idea of public lands in which large numbers of small landowners would share water and grazing resources.
Eventually, neither the government nor the settlers wanted these lands to be privatized. Each interest group — homesteaders, ranchers, and water owners — wanted the lands to continue to be public since each group assumed it would be able to use its own political power to gain de facto use and control of the lands.
Thus, today, we are living with the results of this system throughout the west. Federally-owned lands continue because interest groups would rather battle for control of the lands through political means than allow the lands to be privatized and pass outside the control of special interests. Meanwhile, the public in general tolerates this state of affairs because so many view markets as damaging to both the environment and ordinary citizens. For all its faults, they reason, federal ownership of the land must be less bad that private or even local-government ownership.
Eastern Oregon as Microcosm
In the current controversy over public lands in eastern Oregon, we're witnessing just another conflict between interest groups over how federal lands should be used, and the history of land politics in eastern Oregon tends to mirror the West overall.
In eastern Oregon as elsewhere, an important step in giving the Federal government a larger role in the local economy was in turning reservation lands into "public" lands for use by whites.
William N. Grigg has recently explored how conflicts between ranchers and Piute Indians in eastern Oregon led to demands by the ranchers for a larger federal role in the area. And, when the Piute Indians were finally forced out of Oregon, this paved the way for more federal control over lands in the region as what were once Indian lands became federally managed "public lands."
But the drive among interest groups to control federal lands extends well beyond conflicts with Indians. Throughout the West in the late 19th century, cattle ranchers were engaged in regular feuds with sheep herders and farmers over who could use and control federal lands. Oregon was no different.
In her book Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares, Nancy Langston looks at how conflict among competing groups vying for control of the land in eastern Oregon led to ranchers calling for more federal involvement. Following the expulsion of the Piutes, the public lands quickly began to be overgrazed both on old Indian lands and in other public lands as well.
According to Langston, "law and custom specified that the range was supposed to be open to all, and not the exclusive property of the wealthy. Grass in the mountains was free and belonged to those who got their first: the Enclosures Act of 1873 stated to t no one could legally fence public domain."
As is typical with any "commons," the resources in public lands were immediately strained to the point of making the land unusable. This then led to violence as each group attempted to exclude all other groups from the land. Langston explains:
Tensions finally spilled over into cattle and sheep wars throughout eastern oregon. In Union county, cattle owners formed a group called the Sheep Shooters Association. They ran advertisements in the La Grande Gazette identifying certain cattle ranges where sheepherders were advised not to cross recognizable boundaries ... they also announced they would be placing lethal saltpeter mixed with stock salt in certain hotly contested range areas. Jon Skovline wrote that "Andy Sullivan, who ran horses on the flats below the Campbell Brothers, homestead burned out several night corrals built by itinerant sheep owners along what is now called Burnt Corral Creek. It is very likely that Sullivan also burned the accompanying tented camps of the herders. Lew McCarty was shot by unknown assailants." Thousands of sheep were also killed in grant county where feelings were strongest because summer range was in shortest supply.
Meanwhile, homesteaders attempted to drive away cattle ranchers when they "fenced the creek bottoms to cut off the water supply from the large stockmen...Bitter feuds resulted."
Violent fueds between sheep herders and cattle ranchers continued for years until, by 1903, Langston writes, " local sheepmen as well as cattlemen were ready for regulation, even though [the sheepmen] feared the government would rule in favor of cattle over sheep ... Ranchers were ready for an end to the disputes and increasingly welcomed government intervention."
The "Sheep Wars," as they are known today, were hardly unique to eastern Oregon, nor were the range wars between homesteading farmers and cattle ranchers.
For the most part, the cattle ranchers, through more effective use of fear and intimidation, won these political conflicts, and throughout the first half of the 20th century, the "Cattlemen's Associations" dominated state legislatures and the land use bureaucracies that regulated land use throughout the West. They've even passed laws making it illegal to criticize cattle ranchers.
In a familiar story of regulatory capture in which the regulated interest group actually controls the regulators, the cattle industry has long shaped debate over the use of public lands for grazing purposes.
Since the 1960s, however, the cattlemen have been increasingly eclipsed by other interests including environmentalists and urban residents looking for expanded access to water. The EPA has assumed an expanding role in managing federal lands and neighboring areas, and with it comes greater regulation on ranchers and on land use in general. Environmentalists are relishing their relatively newfound power, and ranchers don't like it when they're unable to exercise the same amount of influence to which they have been historically accustomed.
It is this new ideological and political conflict that is fueling today's battles between federal land agencies and ranchers.
However, it should be remembered that, generally speaking, ranchers who use federal lands have never been opposed to the existence of federal lands. After all, federal subsidization of water projects and federal control of watersheds has furnished ranchers with cheap water for years, at the expense of taxpayers and urban dwellers. In dry and high-altitude areas especially, cattle are reliant on alfalfa crops and on other non-forage feed, which means their need for water is immense.
Why We Need Decentralization Now
If we wish to defuse national conflicts over land use, the only answer is to decentralize the land itself. It should be no concern of people in Washington, DC — 3,000 miles away — as to how a handful of ranchers want to use a tiny corner of land in rural Oregon. Similarly, taxpayers in, say, Ohio (a net taxpayer state) should not be paying to mitigate the effects of overgrazing by ranchers in Oregon, or to build their water projects.
There are, of course, many legal and constitutional obstacles to decentralizing land ownership, but the political obstacles are numerous as well. For example, many ranchers oppose ending federal ownership of grazing lands because it would likely mean an increase in grazing fees.
Moreover, federal rules mean ranchers can often maintain their federal leases indefinitely without having to worry about prices ever being driven up by competitors.
Were grazing lands to be taken over by states or localities — or privatized — ranchers would have to compete with other ranchers, outdoor-recreation proprietors, and conservationist billionaires on the open market. Ranchers may quickly find that their formerly cozy grazing arrangements are now unaffordable. For many ranchers, a federal bird in hand is still better than two private-sector birds in the bush.
At the same time, environmentalists want perpetual federal control because they are convinced that any decentralization or privatization would mean that lands will be taken over by rapacious ranchers and miners.
But would they?
It is not at all clear that markets or local governments would prefer that land be used for agricultural purposes as opposed to other purposes. For example, were Rocky Mountain National Park to become a locally-controlled park or state park, there is, realistically speaking, zero chance that it would be handed over to ranchers or miners. The park is far too valuable to the local economy as part of the recreation and tourism industries. To turn the park into range land would devastate the economies of the local communities, many of which contain wealthy and influential voters.
But, say that the park were broken up into parcels and sold to a number of private owners. (We're in the realm of pure fantasy at this point.) It would make little sense to use the land for mining or ranching even in this case. Given the infrastructure in place and the relative closeness to a major metropolitan area, the lands in and around the Park are likely far more lucrative for recreational purposes than for mining or ranching.
So, when we ask the question of "if it's privatized/decentralized, won't those people take over the land?" The answer is: "It depends."
Yes, some remote or otherwise unattractive areas will lend themselves to ranching and strip mining, and some areas (especially those less remote from where people live) will lend themselves to being preserved as parks and recreational facilities. The lands in the American west are incredibly diverse and different areas will be ideal for different purposes.
And, in an age of growing eco-tourism and outdoor recreation, there's a lot more to the west than ranching and mining.
But let us never forget that were it not for federal infrastructure such as dams, military bases, and federal highways, the West would have far fewer people and much less development than it does today. As has been demonstrated by numerous scholars of the West — especially Gerald Nash in his economic history of the West, The Federal Landscape — the development of the West has been largely dependent on federal spending — and we're talking about spending far above and beyond the initial federal efforts that cleared out the original inhabitants and laid down the first intercontinental railroad. The modern West as we know it today is a result of immense federal spending done during the Depression and the Cold War.
Likewise, it has been the federal government that has created the billion-dollar mega-dams, dumped plutonium into the ground, and failed miserably at fire suppression. The footprint of the federal government is everywhere in the west, and it could very well be that in a world with a smaller federal government, the West would look very different indeed.
The Democracy of the Marketplace
Ultimately, however, its the democracy of the marketplace that is best suited to determine how lands should be used in the west.
The perennial conflicts in the West over land seizures by environmentalists, regulatory battles, micromanagement, and overgrazing all illustrate how much of a failure the federal land ownership scheme has been.
With control over such immense resources, the far away federal government does not respond to local needs or local demand, but to national interest groups.
If we truly wish to democratize the use of land in the west, we would privatize it, or at the very least make it responsive to local populations instead of national interests. It is the marketplace, and not politics, that truly reflects the desires and needs of the people who wish to use lands and reward or punish those who own it.
In his book Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises long ago explained how it is the consumers who decide how economic inputs (such as land) are to be used:
The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors. With them nothing counts more than their own satisfaction. They bother neither about the vested interests of capitalists nor about the fate of the workers who lose their jobs if as consumers they no longer buy what they used to buy.
In the absence of bailouts, subsidies, and government protections, only those who use the land in a way that benefits others will be rewarded accordingly, at the expense of their competitors.
What will land use in the West look like for the next 100 years? Will it be just another century of unaccountable federal bureaucrats picking winners and losers? Or will the democracy of the marketplace be permitted and thus allow the people who use the land and depend upon it to have a say?
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Primal scream, Bundy paid his fees, just not to the BLM.
You are correct to hit people with the reality stick regarding the price of beef going up if ranchers were to be hit with higher permit fees. Sheeple must be able to pay for primo satellite programming and the newest iPhone, food budget is whatever if leftover.
The entire drama is just a clumsy rehearsal for what is really at issue and that's water. The federal government wants to control ALL the water. That's what they are doing in the Wasatch Front of Utah through all the local governments. Tying it all up through the Forest Service. It's a big secret and done very slowly and carefully.
Once they control the water, they control you.
Don't forget: it is all about Agenda 21. They want a world with a lot fewer people. A lot fewer.
"Don't forget: it is all about Agenda 21. They want a world with a lot fewer people. A lot fewer"
Well that is the commoners agenda. Like the bible - most never saw - and still don't - the bible is all allegory.
Religion (i.e., Agenda 21) is magic for the masses; Magick is religion for the few.
Sure a kill off will happen, but that is not the end game.
To understand the end game - one must look beyond the veil.
So Roc, what is the end game? What IS beyond the veil?
As I see it stacking up, the end game is total control. Top to bottom. Everything. And 500 million people on all of earth, as Agenda 21 claims is sustainable, is what they want. That means several billion of us have to go.
The Burocracies are corrupt, backed up by a corrupt Legal System, backed up by corrupt Politicians, backed up by corrupt Bankers, backed up by an imaginary currency, which creates the demand for the Burocracies to need a Legal System to enforce Laws passed by Politicians who need to borrow money from the Bankers to create the Burocracies to fix the problems created by the Laws they needed to write to please the Bankers, it's simple supply and demand. Are we clear now?
and here's a detailed vid on why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja3ygTxZgv4
Nobody gave me the land under my house, you cockeating trailer-trash. I had to buy it, something the vile Mormon Trash in the western states are themselves free to do. But the Mountain Klan instead rely on the actual taxpayers to provide everything they have, all the while bemoaning racial minorities on "welfare."
There is a great movie about private range vs. open range cattlemen with Robert Duval and Kevin Costner.
Open Range, 2003.
Great movie? It bored the shit out of me. Watch Lonesome Dove instead, not the shitty sequels/prequels but the original.
Agreed. Not a good movie overall; however, the final shootout ranks up there with the best in Western films. Worth it if you can get through the first two hours of Duvall retreading Gus from LD and Costner's inability to act.
Reading Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) is a better way to spend time if one wants to understand just how dark the human is.
does the FED have to pay tax on the land that they stole
For some land use situations they pay PILT, which is an anagram for Payments in Lieu of Taxes.
Hell no they don't and where are our checks from Boise Cascade timber access etc? If I'm not getting a check then the US tax payer should be getting a check or credit on their taxes for the frickin trees that are being harvested out of our land. Where is this money going? Toyota trucks for ISIS?
When they start fracking in federal land, and they will if they haven't already, where are those checks going to go? Paying for Obamas golf excursions, bombing a bunch of kids or flying some pedophiles around the world?
Let me tell you a story about land "ownership". A friend owned a 20k hectare game farm in Zimbabwe. On his property he had over 20 white rhinos and the herd was growing. While they were over there for a month in July over 15 years ago now the Zimbabwe officials showed up with a police and military presence and told them they had four hours to pack what they could carry and to never return. The property worth millions was taken.
The first thing the government did was slaughter all the rhinos to sell the horns for daggers. Though in reality this is a dramatic example of government run amok in a country ruled by a virtual dictator here in America you never really own any land either. Stop paying your taxes or your mortgage and sooner or later men with guns will show up and throw you out.
We live under the delusion that we have rights that are God given. While they may be God given the reality is your private property rights and right for privacy end at the barrel of a gun. Drunk driving checki lanes on holidays where all cars are stopped and cops talk to you looking for alcohol use are unconstitutional. Go ahead and blow by the check lane and see how quickly your privacy is protected by the powers that be. In God We Trust all others pay cash.
We may be the land of the free. After working 47 years of my 60 in this country and for many years paying tens of thousands in taxes I have finally figured out we may live in the land of the free but we are slaves to a system.
The force of the gun is what rules in the land of the free. Nothing more and nothing less. A Chicago liquor store owner enforced his private property rights just last night as he shot and killed 2 armed men attempting to rob his liquor store. I guess he could have given them the money and called 911 huh? He could have caved like a 3 dollar suitcase and let the robbers decide if they would shoot him or not ?
By the way if governments are the same all over as to how much the steal from your pocket then you decide the cleanest dirty shirt in the hamper to wear . That's for all you bachelors out there.
+1,000 Hunter
Sure. But as you point out, land can be taken OR protected by force.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, people in rural areas with productive capacity who had prepared to defend the land, did just fine as the government was BUSTED and had no resources, period. The mafia/gangs took over the cities and made deals with local military to take over what legitamate "government" was left.
Some states that had resources and were controlled by different mafia/gangs LEFT the union etc.
In the absence of a truly unifying government and philosphy that is fair for everyone, I suspect the same damn thing will happen in the U.S. I'd stay away from cities that are filled with any decendents related to the fucking monkeys running Zimbabwe as well.
agreed
"We may be the land of the free. After working 47 years of my 60 in this country and for many years paying tens of thousands in taxes I have finally figured out we may live in the land of the free but we are slaves to a system."
some say we (the human project) are rebellious slaves
I am not so sure rebellious is the right term for most.
I can shorten this article right up.
Unconstitutionally. The end.
The federal govt never received authority from the States via an amendment to own land other than DC.
Give all the federal land to the States in which the land is located.
They can have land within the States for limited purposes:
and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;--And
Other needful buildings would have to be for similar purposes as those listed and would not include a 100 year old outhouse.
This article is a bait and switch.
The Western lands predominately controlled by the BLM were not part of the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana Purchase lands were ceded to the new states formed from those territories.
The the author leaps to the homestead act...after legitimizing the transformation ofpioneers who settled unoccupied land into serfs on a plantation.
The Western Lands in question were alternately claimed by England, Russia, France, Portugal....I could go on... And Spain. That last fiction being the source of Mexico's claim to lands they neither settled nor controlled.
And the narrative is that Mexico ceded those lands in treaty after the Mexican American war.
Except while half the government's of the world were busy claiming lands they'd never set foot on, SOME people actually did settle those lands. And they formed their own governments, all before this fictional cession ever occurred.
And they later applied to be territories, and then states, under the same "Enabling Acts" as did every State West of Virginia. Those Acts contain EXPLICIT language in which the "foreign" territory was to be ceded from the "foreign" government to the Federal Government, who would then cede it back to the State legislature when elected.
Except they never kept their end of the bargain. Instead they declared every acre not under active cultivation to be the property of Dept of Interior. Grazing land isn't considered cultivation. Hence,Rancher's land was simply seized.
Hmmm... maybe the reason the FEDs don't go after the guys
in Oregon, is because they serve a useful purpose???
If you x-fer these "federal" lands back to the states,
this property ( and its costs <<-- ) go with them...
Just a thought.
Yes, the Feds could "remove" these squatters any time they want.
It isn't worth the costs, period.
If I lived in that area, I would STOP PAYING ALL FEDERAL TAXES immediately and rally every single business and corporation/person in the area to promote just that. Return of those assets to the county and state balance sheet. After doing so, get a real militia together to deal with these outsiders. Start by shutting off the electricity and water. Make it clear that they have one last opportunity to leave. Those who refuse will be shot when a local marksmen has a clean shot that will result in a humane death.
Shit is going to get real "local" soon enough, might as well get the ball rolling.
all i ever wanted was to be a sheep farmer but the damn cattle barons forced me out.........
"First of all was the fact of Indian settlement on Western lands. It may strike many as hard to believe, but the treatment of the Indian tribes west of the Mississippi was actually more restrained than it had been in Eastern states."
someone hasn't read Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee
If that's the case it was because Americans in the east were finding out what was really going on and they were pissed. The authorities had created a bunch of BS memes as usual framing the indian as a big boogieman and people were finding out the truth. They were running against the clock of awareness and people did care about the Indian, just not the people that had been sent out to "deal with the Indian problem" and the greedy bastards that followed them.
Nothing worse than the throng of inhumanity that shows up for a land, gold or oil rushes. Same as it ever was.
This is a non-trivial issue, but most of you are thinking in the wrong terms. You're not stepping back far enough. What we have now is gross perversion: the most simple basic right of any form of life, the right to occupy space, is a right we have been dispossessed of. It is now a privilege we have to pay for. Do any of you realize how fucked up that is? For any other animal in the world this right is free for teh taking. It has been for most of human existence; until very recently you just lived within your tribe's little area and pitched a tent or whatever... nobody would dream of disputing your right to do so.
This is the very basis of our enslavement. It was the basis of the move away from chattel slavery during the 19th century; when land is abundant and people are scarce the only way to get real labor out of them is to round them up, restrict their movements, and force them to work at literal gunpoint. When all the land is owned by someone else (note the massive giveaways to the rail companies amongst others during that time) and people are more abundant, you can force them to work for you by making space and food something you have no alternative but to pay for. Wage slavery instead of chattle slavery. Even better, it provides insurance against slave revolts because you can convince the slaves that it's all voluntary.
Although I am white, I do not identify with the American factory worker. I identify with the Indians, and we want the land back! Unrestricted access to land is the ONLY path to human freedom. Freedom to choose your job is only meaningful if you don't need one, just as freedom to choose what school you attend doesn't even begin to be empowering unless it includes the freedom to not attend at all.
Edited to add: I get that this line of thinking is probelmatic with the present population. I've mentioned in other threads that we are in a very deep hole and there proobably is no near-term path to human freedom.
Spot on.
"Do any of you realize how fucked up that is? For any other animal in the world this right is free for teh taking. It has been for most of human existence; until very recently you just lived within your tribe's little area and pitched a tent or whatever... nobody would dream of disputing your right to do so. "
In White's seminole book - The Once and Future King - Merlin attempts to explain exactly this relationship to King Arthur at the end of the novel.
It is very basic:
Warring species (ants and bees) = hive mind
Cooperative species (everything else) = non-collective mind
Humans are caught between the two, but because we are rebellious/cowardly slaves - we are being synched up into the hive...voluntarily, for most, i may add.
Are you the same Roccman who used to post at life after the oil crash, and after that the oil age?
yup
How does this relate to the family in Oregon being re-arrested by the FBI for "terrorist" charges, after they already served time for arson?
US got the lands by right of conquest bitches...you want a piece of that, you either beg and pay taxes or you find yourself an army that can take on the USA, so quit your welfare queen whinning and bend over like everyone else. Ranchers just another bunch of parasites that have been coddled by the Feds for so long they think they're entitled to some shit no body else is entitled to. Fuck off
So you like being a slave. Good for you. I get that there is fuckall we can do right now, but we'll NEVER find an answer if we don't have the conversation.
Please do not distract or confuse me with constitutional issues. What's the latest regarding the Kardashians? When is my next EBT allotment due? Those meddling ranchers are getting to be a real distraction.
Fed == cabals