Whose land is it?

Has the federal government become so arrogant as to claim ownership of the land over which it has jurisdiction? Put differently, does the United States of America exist to protect and defend the property of each individual living within its borders, or to own and control that property itself? This is not a theoretical question reserved for intellectual banter. It is a real question pondered often, especially by those in western states, where the majority of land is owned and regulated by the federal government. Although the federal government owns less than 10% of almost every eastern state, it owns large swaths of the West: 65% of the land in Utah, 83% of Nevada, 63% of Idaho, 45% of Arizona, 44% of California and similar percentages of the surrounding western states. That may soon change if the efforts of the Utah legislature are successful. The legislature has passed a package of bills that demands that the federal government give up its claim to huge sections of “public” land. One of the bills includes a demand that nearly 30 million acres be handed over to the state — nearly 50% of the land in Utah — by 2014. “If sovereignty means anything, it means not having to say pretty please, or mother may I,” state Rep. Ken Ivory, who is leading the Utah initiative, recently told Fox News...more  

The column also says:

 During the nineteenth century, the federal government acquired what is now the western U.S. through the Louisiana Purchase, the purchases of Florida, the Oregon Territory and Alaska, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and a few smaller agreements. Until 1976, the federal government had a policy of gradually disposing of these lands in order to form new states. The money generated from the land sales would then be used to pay down the national debt. In 1833, President Andrew Jackson remarked that such an arrangement “bound the United States to a particular course of policy … by ties as strong as can be invented to secure the faith of nations.”

And:

In 1894, Congress passed Utah’s Enabling Act, which laid out the conditions under which Utah could become a state. The act guaranteed that if Utah became a state, the federal government would sell off Utah’s federally owned lands in a timely fashion. Utah complied with the act and became a state in January 1896. In 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy Management Act, which says that “it is the policy of the United States that the public lands be retained in Federal ownership unless … it is determined that disposal of a particular parcel will serve the national interest.” The Federal Land Policy Management Act clearly violates Utah’s Enabling Act, as well as the enabling acts of other western states...n short, the federal government promised to give Utah the land it controlled, selling it off to pay down the national debt. In a flagrant violation of that contractual obligation, the federal government now wants to keep two-thirds of the land in the entire state with no regard for its previous promise, let alone the massive imbalance in federal land holdings between eastern and western states.  

It's time everyone learned the fed's aren't "bound" by anything, not even by "ties as strong as can be invented to secure the faith of nations” and their "promises" mean nothing.