Enabling Act implications
The cost of Hoarding
Sovereign States
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
Earlier
this week the Department of Education for the state of Arizona made a public
statement calling for the transfer of federal lands to the state. The state’s
Superintendent of Public Instruction and several state legislators gathered at
a Phoenix Plaza to request the transfer. Their argument was based on the fact
that federal land agencies lose $.27 per acre for every dollar spent in
management.
What too
many people don’t know is that state’s enabling legislation, the same as my
home state of New Mexico’s, set forth the requirement to reserve four sections
within each Township, sections 2, 16, 32, and 36, for the purposes of revenue
generation for the education of the states’ sweaty masses. Notwithstanding the
fact that many federal legislators in 1912 did not support the idea of either
state’s entry into the Union because of their suspect populous, the idea of
educating those western urchins was solved by deeding lands to the states with
the marching orders to fund classrooms and gleaming hallways.
Arizona
does a pretty good job of that by generating more than $14 for every dollar spent
in the management of its state trust lands. (New Mexico’s efforts are better and
attributed to oil and gas revenues that are scarce in Arizona). Arizona State
Representative Mark Finchem, R-11, standing alongside the superintendent, noted
they could actually do better than their federal handlers by an additional $2B
annually if the state managed federal lands within their boundaries (New Mexico
would outperform even that by even due to the noted difference in revenue
sources).
A realistic
debate of the problem, however, is long overdue. It isn’t just federal
mismanagement of lands that is being painted. It is more specific. When the
management of lands is predicated on the fiduciary responsibility of generating
positive net returns, positive net returns do occur. When there is no such
directive and the management of lands reverts to nebulous matters of
conservation, protection of objects and or the transfer of wealth to special
interests, expanding losses in revenues and … freedoms inevitably result.
Sovereign States
The State of Arizona is actually
a worthy model of human accomplishment. The state currently ranks 21 (down from
18 in 2006) among all states in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while it sits at
the number 16 spot in terms of state size. That is right between Alabama and
Georgia which also bracket its performance in their GDP ranking of and 26 and
10, respectively.
What?
You have been taught Arizona is the
sixth largest state in the Union? It may
be in footprint but it isn’t in terms of lands from which the state can
actually create jobs, build homes, and expand opportunities for future
generations. Government of one form or another owns 57% of the state which
means that the state’s future rests squarely on its private lands consisting of
31,420,000 ± acres. A total of 41,311,200 acres are owned outright or held in
trust by Washington and or Phoenix. As such, Arizonans cannot count on any
aspect of private property rights to be secured or upheld through investments
on those lands.
The State of Arizona, the actual
sovereign state of the people, ranks alongside the noted states of Georgia and
Alabama as well as Illinois, Wisconsin, and Arkansas when private property and
the merit of equal footing with eastern states is factored. Other western
states like Nevada and Alaska are worse off. When the sovereign rights of those
states are factored similarly, Nevada is wedged between West Virginia and
Maryland. Alaska, nominally the largest state in the union, takes its place
between Idaho and Utah in private property!
It is a good thing American people
are actually gullible and obedient beings … the farcical constitutional breach
of sovereignty in the West is stifling.
‘O Fair New Mexico’
New Mexico earns somewhere in the
neighborhood of $80 per acre in the management of its state trust lands. That
stands in juxtaposition to negative earnings per acre by land agencies on the 28,143,100
± acres owned or held in trust by the federal government. Both of those compare
to the state’s GDP spread across gross state acres of $1227 per acre. Without
going into further detail to derive an actual return to private property, the
difference between negative earnings, $80 per acre earnings, and $1227 per acre
earnings (which comes disproportionately from privately held lands) is shocking.
The consequence of government land ownership of any sort is staggering.
Hoarding has consequences!
That brings the subject down to
southwestern New Mexico where any attrition of private property has become
economically unacceptable. A drive through the once self sufficient towns of
Lordsburg, Reserve, Deming, Hurley and even Silver City is depressing. The tax
base is already struggling and three of the four counties implicit in the
preceding would be ranked in the top 20 most at risk counties in the nation if
they had enough populations to make the cut.
Yet in those counties (Catron,
Grant, Hidalgo, Luna, and neighboring Dona Ana County), the state and federal
governments are in designating thousands more acres of higher level protections
and buying private land for environmental mitigation as if it actually existed
in an economic vacuum. The cost to customs and culture is beyond staggering and
yet local pleas are simply ignored.
Two examples are in order for
discussion. Both are ranches, both have been acquired by the State of New
Mexico and both are taking private lands off the tax rolls. The Double E Ranch
in the Gila watershed in Grant County was established by the Hooker family that
came to New Mexico Territory in a reverse migration from California in the
1870s. The ranch is now owned by the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish
ostensibly for the trendy pursuit of habitat mitigation. If cattle continue to
be run on the property, it will not be done by that agency. If water resources
on the ranch are maintained or expanded, it will not be from the livestock
operation that once funded and maintained it. It will be tax dollars. If the
state leases that once existed for the livestock operation are renewed, it will
be from tax dollars to pay New Mexico State Land Office lease requirements.
The sound of that is somewhat akin
to chalk grating across a blackboard. Paying state leases for Enabling Act
purposes of funding the educational system with money extracted from a
citizenry facing a declining tax rolls is simply ludicrous if it isn’t constitutionally
criminal.
The second ranch is the Broad
Canyon Ranch in Dona Ana County. It is now owned by the state’s parks and
recreation group. The occasional State of New Mexico personnel seen on the
ground herald it as a “game refuge”. Neighboring operations are perplexed how
any “game refuge” can be established without legislative approval, and,
furthermore, how any state agency can post such lands to hunting and trespass that
include federal BLM holdings while thumbing their noses at the contractual
obligations that private citizens are held to in the same circumstances.
Private citizens are required to maintain base waters by their grazing
contracts. Private citizens are also required to run cattle on these lands if
and when conditions allow such activity.
This allotment has no cattle. The actual
water base is now defunct. In fact, this allotment no longer has a drop of
water on it other than the residual pools in the Rio Grande River channel
following seasonal irrigation releases. Aside from the contractual breaches,
any objective citizen should question the viability of any game refuge, whether
legal or not, if all water sources outside of the river channel are nonworking
or nonexistent.
The matter of the renewal of this
grazing lease by the State Land Office will be watched. The title holder has
two options to convince the Commissioner. It can seek a renewal on the basis of
livestock grazing which has been the case since 1912 or it can up the ante and
seek a more expensive commercial lease in order to convince the Land
Commissioners to act in its favor. Both options require the transfer of tax
money with the collateral impact of contributing to a declining tax base while
not protecting species that once had water when cattle were present. In the
case of the Broad Canyon allotment, cattle and game refuges seem to be mutually
exclusive.
A private citizen wouldn’t get the
lease renewed nor would he get the same extension by the BLM in the allotment
renewal … our government seems to play by a different set of rules.
Stephen
L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “The continued sniping of
private property and ranching allotments being carried in parallel with
expanding land protection designations is
taking place amidst a community where there is now a 17% recruitment of next
generation stewards … is there any wonder futures are in doubt?”
Here are some appropriate quotes from others:
When Plymouth Colony was founded in Massachusetts in 1620, the Pilgrims at first held their property in common. They were on the verge of starvation when ownership was privatized in 1623. The change succeeded. It "made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been," William Bradford reported. The communal arrangement had not worked because it "was thought injustice."
More recently, a vast experiment in life without private property was conducted in the Soviet Union. It lasted for seventy-four years, and it conclusively showed that transferring the control of property to the state is a formula for social impoverishment. There wasn't much in the way of justice either. As for liberty, that was lost completely. An Iron Curtain had to be constructed north-to-south in Eastern Europe, and a wall divided Berlin.
---Tom Bethell
Few concepts have been more important for human survival, yet maligned as unjust by intellectuals, as the concept of private property rights. Since at least the time of Aristotle, the superiority of private property over collective ownership in generating incentives to use scarce resources effectively has been recognized. It was a core idea of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, as well as the American Revolutionaries such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.
---Peter Boettke
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