Federal Arrogance Fuels The New Sagebrush Rebellion
The recent standoff between the paramilitary wing of the US Bureau of Land Management and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is simply bringing to the surface a long standing controversy between BLM, USDA, and other federal agencies and ranchers and miners in the West. This is not new. It is merely a continuation of the Sagebrush Rebellion that began under the regime of the odious James Earl Carter.
As in so many other cases, the root cause of the problem is a federal government that is imperious, overbearing, and has ceased to remember that it exists as a servant of the people, not as their master or jailer. If you live in the Eastern half of the nation you may be scratching your head over why federal land ownership is a big deal. If you live out West you confront the problem every day:
Federal lands in the American West are not only poorly managed, the produce, in true federal fashion, deficits instead of profits:
The BLM’s net outlays in fiscal 2011 were $1.5 billion.22 BLM lands produce about $4 billion in annual revenues, but almost all of the revenues come from less than 1 million acres of land, mostly from coal in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin and oil and gas in parts of Alaska. The remaining 99 percent of BLM lands are a burden on federal taxpayers, but they needn’t be if they were managed efficiently and charges were adjusted to optimize revenues.
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In addition to bad policy, the BLM has attracted managers who look upon the federal lands as their personal fiefdoms to do with as they see fit. BLM managers have used the Endangered Species Act as a cudgel to curtail or forbid off road recreational activity and ranching is large areas. In 2004, the BLM aggressively pushed to have law enforcement authority on highways that passed through federally owned land rather than having that function performed by state and county police. This would not only have wildly increased the power of the BLM but it would have created a new revenue stream for them—fines from traffic violations.
This phenomenon was summed up neatly in an unrelated essay by Theodore Dalrymple:
There is, as every petty official knows, a great deal of pleasure to be had from the obstruction of others, especially if they appear to be more fortunate, better placed, richer, or more intelligent than oneself. There is a pleasure in naysaying, all the greater if the naysayer is able to disguise from the victim the fact that he is not only doing his duty but gratifying himself. Indeed, there are many jobs, meaningless in themselves, in which the power to say no is the only non-monetary reward.
IMHO: with the exception of places like Yellow Stone ... ALL Federal Lands need to be turned over to the states, for conservation or economic development [timber, oil, etc ]
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