In April 2014, hundreds of armed protesters gathered at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada to take a stand against the federal government.
The post Four Years Ago, Hundreds of Armed Protesters Stood Up to Tyrannical US Gov’t Overreach—And Won appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The U.S. government plans to spew occupying forces far and wide within the United States.
Or… The U.S. government will distribute the income of the bureaucratic class across distressed regions of the country.
Are they spreading the wealth, or spreading the swamp?
The government’s definition of decentralizing is certainly not the same as ours. They think moving government agencies’ central offices out of DC is decentralizing the government. It’s like an Amelia Bedelia book. Well, the people said they wanted decentralized government!
But generally, when people advocate decentralizing government, they mean the power structure, not the physical presence of government agents.
But still, it is not so clear whether moving agencies out of DC would be a good thing or a bad thing.
The Good
DC is an echo chamber. It is an insular club where people never see the American people they supposedly work for, represent, and serve.
While only 15% of the federal workforce is in Washington, it is where most of the top decision makers live and work. David Fontana, a professor at George Washington University Law School who is writing a book about decentralizing the federal government, says their bubble is growing evermore insulated from reality.
Embedding government agencies throughout the country could make top bureaucrats more empathetic towards the average American when they see how their decisions hurt them.
Citizens’ concerns might actually be heard when government officials are their neighbors. Instead of a tally on a spreadsheet, officials would hear it from a friend.
Increasing physical distance between bureaucrats, lawmakers, and other agencies could cut down on corruption, behind the scenes string-pulling, and closed-door collusion to harm the American people.
DC suburbs include the five richest counties in the entire United States. The lowest median household income among these counties is $108,706 per year! That is almost twice the median household income of the United States at large. Altogether, 9 of the 20 highest income counties in the USA are suburbs of DC.
Instead of that money remaining in the DC area, some of it would be spread out across the country. Original tax dollars paid out as salaries to government employees would be spent in a local small town establishments instead of in DC.
The Bad
When the Chinese invaded Tibet, they sought to destroy their culture by importing Chinese businesses, citizens, and government agents. Of course, they claimed to be improving the economies of impoverished Tibetan regions. And technically, they have made Tibet wealthier by injecting billions of dollars into the region.
DC could end up exporting its culture across the United States. Greed, corruption, crony-deals, and power hungry ideals would come with the money. Local officials would become like crime bosses, trading favors for federal cash.
The Stanford economist representing Silicon Valley in Congress sees opportunity to strategically seed regions of the country with pieces of the federal bureaucracy that can benefit them — and that they can benefit.
In Tibet, the less educated locals end up doing menial jobs, while the best gigs go to imported Chinese nationals. Will the people living near the new government offices become a servant class? It would be the ultimate reversal of what the government is intended to do: serve the people.
One of the most oppressive government agencies is the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM controls 260 million acres of land, 90% of which is west of the Mississippi. That’s why some lawmakers are calling for the central office to be relocated.
But that is essentially inviting the fox into the henhouse. The BLM has confiscated land, stolen cattle, and issued excessive fines to hikers and property owners. They took 90,000 acres of land along a river in Texas, and refuse to even talk to property owners.
This could escalate and increase occurrences of standoffs like the one on the Bundy Ranch. The agencies would essentially become an occupying force.
The Ugly
Would the American people come to see up close how terrible their government really is? Or would they become more sympathetic–or even corrupt–by the presence of government agents in their communities?
“Decentralizing” the government offices could make the U.S. divide into factions based on what agency is embedded in particular areas. It is already bad enough having Congressmen fight over federal funds. Things could get messy if they advocate for a particular agency which most their constituents belong to. Then you might have the BLM battling with the National Parks Service.
“There is all this unused office space outside of Detroit where the FBI could build for not much money,” said Paul Kupiec, a scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. That city, unlike suburban Washington, desperately needs the economic surge such an agency would bring, he said. “Why are we spending billions of dollars on these headquarters in Washington?”
Will the FBI, then, run Michigan? They would have some pretty intense pull in the local scene. And perhaps any Congressmen who don’t want to help out Michigan lawmakers might end up… under investigation.
What Would Really Help…
Maybe it isn’t the government agencies which need to stay away from DC, but the politicians. In the internet age, why do they need to spend tax dollars flying to DC, and staying in swanky accommodations, eating expensive food?
All the members of Congress can simply video call in for their votes. They can talk to other politicians via government technology that records their meetings. That way, there is a record of their communications. That means fewer backroom deals and more pressure from constituents. No more hiding in DC!
We can dream.
What do you think? Would distributing the government offices across America breed harmony or resentment? Would government officials become empathetic towards their fellow Americans, or simply abuse them from a closer range? Would the people in surrounding areas be enriched by tax-funded salaries, or sink into the swamp?
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Did you know that the federal government owns 28 percent of all land in the United States?
Today, the feds control approximately 640 million acres of land, and after decades of very poor management, many are calling on the states to take a larger role. This is particularly true in the 11 western states where the federal government collectively owns 47 percent of all land. East of the Mississippi River, the feds only own 4 percent of all land, and there is no reason for such a disparity to exist. In Connecticut and Iowa, the federal government only owns 0.3 percent of all land. Such an arrangement seems to work very well for those states, and so why can’t we dramatically reduce federal land ownership in the western states as well?
Of course the federal government will always need a very small amount of land for certain national purposes, and nobody is disputing that. According to the Heritage Foundation, the following are the primary purposes that federal land is being used for…
These holdings include national parks, national forests, recreation areas, wildlife refuges, vast tracts of range and wasteland managed by the Bureau of Land Management, reservations held in trust for Native American tribes, military bases, and ordinary federal buildings and installations.
We will always need to have some land set aside for those purposes.
But does the Bureau Of Land Management really need more than 247 million acres?
Does the Forest Service really need more than 192 million acres?
Does the Fish and Wildlife Service really need more than 89 million acres?
If the feds were doing a good job, that would be one thing, but in so many instances federal land managers have gotten an extremely bad reputation. The following comes from an article by Sue Lani Madsen…
For example, federal land is exempt from state noxious weed control laws, and lack of weed control has earned federal land a reputation as a bad neighbor. Frustrated local federal land managers are hindered by layers of internal regulations and restricted funding that make timely response to weed outbreaks difficult.
And thanks to mismanagement by the feds, wildfires tend to spread very rapidly in many areas owned and controlled by the federal government. At this point more than 2.6 million acres of land have already burned in 2017, and that is close to 30 percent ahead of last year’s pace.
If you have never lived in a western state, it may be difficult for you to imagine just how frustrating it is to have the federal government in control of vast stretches of your state. In so many cases the feds simply do not care about local issues or concerns, and when they drop the ball there is often very little that can be done about it.
According to Ballotpedia, the federal government owns more than 28 percent of the land in 12 different western states…
Here in Idaho, we are glad to have so much public land because it is a wonderful thing for hunters, fishers, hikers and those that enjoy other outdoor activities.
So we want to continue our tradition of having wide open spaces that are owned by the public – we just want the federal government to hand over the keys and leave.
We believe that Idaho land should be owned by the people of Idaho, and we believe that Idaho’s natural resources should be managed by the people of Idaho.
Those that are against transferring ownership of federal land to the states often argue that it would be too expensive for the states to handle…
Paying for wildfire protection alone—it accounts for about half of the U.S. Forest Service’s annual budget of $6.5 billion—would burden Western taxpayers, says the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group.
States would be forced to raise taxes or sell off iconic national properties to developers or other private investors in order to pay for everything the federal government does now—from complicated tasks like enforcing environmental regulations and maintaining cultural and historic resources to simple ones like putting up road and trail signs.
But one study found that it is actually profitable for states to manage their own public lands. Here is more from Sue Lani Madsen…
A 2015 study by the Property and Environment Research Center, a free-market environmental think tank, consistently found state-managed land provided a return on every dollar spent while federal lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management cost more to operate than they return in revenue.
At the end of the day, this is just another area where we need to readjust the balance of power between the states and the federal government. Our founders intended to create a system where the states had much more power than the central government, but instead that has become totally flipped around.
Today, it is almost as if the 10th Amendment does not even exist. Most of the time the federal government treats state governments as little more than puppets, and very few state governments have the backbone to stand up for themselves.
As conservatives, we need to start standing up against the costly federal mandates that are imposing such a financial burden on our state governments. We want control of our own laws and our own budgets.
It is also time for the feds to get off the backs of our farmers, our miners, our loggers and our ranchers. Some of the most abusive federal agencies, such as the EPA, need to be shut down entirely. And if our local communities do not want to take Islamic refugees from the Middle East, they should not be forced to do so by the federal government. Here in Idaho, three young Islamic refugees raped a 5-year-old girl, and yet the federal government does not seem to care about our outrage.
Recently, I have been talking to so many people that just want the federal government to leave us alone. Instead of solving our problems, most of the time the federal government is the problem, and things would be so much better if the feds would just stay out of our business.
In the final days of his administration, President Obama has decided that with the stroke of pen, he shall further consolidate direct federal control over lands within Western states. Specifically, Obama created the Bear Ears National Monument and the Gold Butte National Monument in Utah and Nevada, respectively. The Obama Administration claims that Obama"s unilateral edict was necessary because Congress had not passed any legislation on the matter.
Indeed, the Obama-appointed Interior Secretary stated that "protecting the area using legislation would have been preferable" but that in the absence of legislation, it was necessary to simply declare the lands to be National Monuments.
In other words, the democratic, constitutional process of Congressional lawmaking was inconvenient for the President. So, he decided to rule by proclamation instead, giving the Governor of Utah barely an hour"s notice before the proclamation was made public.
Now, we should first note that the overwhelming majority of lands newly designated as National Monument lands were already federal lands to begin with, and have been controlled largely by the US Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.
Moreover, it is not the case that opponents to the new designation are mostly people who want to privatize the land or make it easier to mine or develop the land. In fact, many opponents of the designation oppose it because they fear Monument status will lead to greater development of the area as a tourist mecca.
In other cases, members of Indian tribes object to making sacred lands part of a federally-controlled National Monument area.
And, of course, throughout Western states, public lands continue to be a lucrative source of tourist dollars and eco-tourism. The old caricature of pro-conservationist leftists and strip-mining conservatives has long been just that: a caricature.
The reality is that nowadays many private firms and local governments depend on public lands for their livelihood and revenue, and these groups have quite a bit of influence at the state legislatures in question. Preserving natural spaces from development can mean big business and Western-state politicians know it:
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.
There is little doubt, however, that much of the controversy over the site will be framed like this: on one side are the conscientious environmentalists and others who want to preserve these pristine lands from destruction. On the other side are oil executives who want to strip-mine the land.
The real debate here, however, isn"t over strip mining vs. conservation. It"s about whether or not a president thousands of miles away can — with the stroke of a pen — dictate how millions of acres in a faraway state can be used, and do so over the protestations of the state legislature.
Nor can it be demonstrated that federal agencies are better custodians of lands than are states. Indeed, the federal government has routinely been more inclined to allow overgrazing on federal lands while subsidizing ranchers at taxpayer expense. It is the states that have demonstrated more prudent stewardship of resources.
Moreover, The Denver post in a 2014 editorial noted other cases in which the federal government hapless mismanaged fish and wildlife issues:
One has only to look at the great elk management debacle in Rocky Mountain National Park. When populations grew out of control in the park, federal decision-makers chose to pay significant sums to bring in contract killers to thin the herd. A proposal by Colorado wildlife managers to use well-trained hunters and donate the meat to struggling families was cast aside.
We could further examine the sad case of game fish being electrocuted and buried on the Yampa River in northwest Colorado at the insistence of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to preserve the pikeminnow, while the same pikeminnows are slaughtered and dumped in Washington state to preserve the wild salmon. All of this, in a never-ending nightmare of bureaucratic red tape with no firmly stated goals or objective in sight, by design.
Moreover, federal lands can be manipulated for political purposes putting local communities at risk.
Perhaps the most memorable recent example of this occurred in 2013 when the federal government shut down national parks and other federal lands as part of the usual "government shutdown" ploy. The federal government dispatched federal agents armed with assault rifles who forcibly ejected visitors from the allegedly “public lands.” Meanwhile, nearby towns that rely on tourists for the local economy were powerless to open the parks themselves. State officials, who are far more sensitive to local economic needs than members of Congress or the White House, were also powerless to do anything.
Eventually, after much political pressure was applied, the federal government kindly allowed states to pay millions to the federal government to open the parks again.
These are just some of the reasons why Utahns of various interests have opposed greater federal power over lands in their states.
This Obama Administration"s move with Bear Ears is the latest "screw-you" to Utah in an ongoing effort by the State of Utah to exercise more control over federal lands. For years now, the Utah legislature and the state"s delegation in Congress have been exploring ways to limit federal control over lands within the borders of Utah.
What is steadfastly ignored in the debate however, is the questionable legitimacy of federal control over so many immense swaths of land.
Today, the feds control 640 million acres (not counting the far larger federally-owned areas of coastal sea floor). And in most Western states, the Federal government owns more than a third of all the land. In the case of Utah and Nevada, where the two new monuments are created, the federal government owns 65 percent and 85 percent of all land, respectively.
This means that these lands are ultimately controlled by politicians thousands of miles away who are not citizens of those states. In the case of Utah, for example, federal lands are controlled by executive-branch bureaucrats — few of whom are from Utah — or they are controlled by Congressional laws passed by a Congress composed of 529 non-Utahns and 6 Utahns.
The fact that lands in Utah should be largely controlled by Californians, Texans, and New Yorkers — many of whom have never even set foot in Utah — should strike reasonable people as both objectionable and bizarre.
At the same time, if those lands are truly sacred sites, as some groups contend, then those sites should be Tribal lands and neither federal or state lands. (See "Why Indian-Tribe Sovereignty Is Important.")
Other observers of the Obama Administration"s many executive orders on federal lands have called for the abolition of the Antiquities Act of 1906 which empowers the president to designate federal lands as National Monuments. The Act allows presidents to act unilaterally without any consent from Congress as to how these lands might be designated. Moreover, as critics of the Act note, the Act was supposed to protect small areas of archeological or geographical interest. But, the Act has been abused in order to make many thousands of acres into areas similar to National Parks.
Repealing the acts would be a step in the right direction, but it fails to tackle the larger problem of federal lands. After all, if federal lands were not so expansive to begin with, the Antiquities Act would be far more limited in its scope. And, even if Congress were the body designating Monument status, that would only be a tiny improvement. It"s true that giving a single person in the Oval office the ability to control lands in faraway states is a problem. However, giving that same control to 535 people in a building down the street form the Oval Office isn"t exactly a significant improvement.
