Cleansing of the West
The Attrition of Multiple Use
The expansion of Constitutional Incapacity
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
Life, Liberty, and Property was the vision
that Thomas Jefferson had. He was overruled and the peculiar phrasing of Pursuit of Happiness was inserted.
Jefferson
then demonstrated a very distinctive Jeffersonian characteristic. He was
embittered when his words were deemed inadequate and altered after he was charged
with capturing the context of debate. He preferred his original inclination
with its adherence to natural law. When he didn’t prevail, his rebuttal became
skewed to silence and … grudges.
The majority
of other phrasing was left intact and unchanged. In his mind, that
substantiated his aptitude to convey the concepts of the debates into specific
language. King George, of course, was the villain and he was time and again
referenced in the words Jefferson used to craft the Declaration of our Independence.
Jefferson’s insistence on the use of Property versus Pursuit of
Happiness remains hugely important. How on earth can Pursuit of Happiness even be defined?
To those who understand the tyrannical
force governments can become, the matter of Property
must be recognized as the sole source of collateral for the American citizen. The two are not mutually
exclusive. They are the miracle that sets the American model apart, but,
whereas the American citizen was the
centerpiece, Property was the shield.
It was the armor that protected the gift of sovereignty. Without Property, the American citizen quickly loses his vested standing, and, without
the sovereign American citizen, King
George emerges to control … everything.
Multiple Use Management as the proxy for
private property
The mere
definition of multiple use management should remind us that Jefferson’s
genius has legs.
Multiple use was created in the
vacuum of Jefferson’s preference for private
land ownership. It is government speak for the conditional commitment of
managing federal lands for productive enterprises. In particular, it elevated
the importance of mining, logging, livestock enterprises, and fluid mineral
extraction alongside leisure and recreational uses. It became synonymous with
the nebulous classification of highest and best uses of lands.
From a historical standpoint, though,
it was the federal mechanism to placate western representatives and hold them
in check from revolting over the federal retention of lands. Those leaders
believed in the Jeffersonian insistence in transferring title of public lands
to the American citizenry.
Government had reneged big time and
that trend continues. It owns 40% of the lands of the United States, it controls at least
15% of the remaining, and displays no hesitation in acquiring yet more. Regardless
of explanation, that represents a boat load of the actual constitutional
allowances under the Property Clause, and sections 2, 16, 32,
and 36 of each Township of several western states whose populous was deemed too
ignorant to support the education of their uncouth youth.
How can those two polar extremes
exist under original intent?
Multiple use was concocted as the
proxy to jump start and fuel local economies of the West where federal dominion
limited the benefits of private property. Its creation was purported to reduce reliance
on government in reducing debt and stimulating local wellbeing. It was intended
to help create products, pay taxes and bills, and provide jobs.
But, now, it, too, is disappearing.
There is logic that suggests its rate of decline is more rapid than that of endangered
species. Casting aside the 173,790,000 acres of lands the federal government
holds in trust for the purpose of Indian and military reservations, the federal
agencies control 640,000,000 acres directly (in addition to the effective
control of the noted private lands that exist in checkerboard holdings arrayed
within those lands). The assumption would be that the majority of those lands
exist as multiple use as promulgated by extensive federal legislation at least
since the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916.
Multiple use management, however, now
constitutes less than 42% of that federal land designations (along with a
shrinking portion of state lands management).
In work done in 2013 by Joanne
Spivack of the New Mexico Off Highway Vehicle Alliance, it was discovered there
are now more federal acres designated as Wilderness, National Park Service
non-wilderness, and USFWS wildlife refuges (collectively, the big three) than
exist under multiple use management. In fact, those legislative designations
alone are greater by 3,100,000 acres than multiple use managed lands.
To add impact, there is also another
98,480,000 acres of national recreation areas, inventoried roadless areas,
wilderness study areas, and 30,200,000 million acres of special protective
designations where multiple use is a restricted use rather than a purpose of
the designations. That represents 153,875 square miles of protections with full
or partial diminishment of productive and job creating activities. That is an
area equating to the contiguous states of Maine,
New Hampshire, Vermont,
Massachusetts, Rhode
Island, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and
39% of Pennsylvania.
If the big three were added to that
land mass, it would require an area the size of the foregoing (including all of
Pennsylvania) in addition to the states of Virginia, West Virginia,
North Carolina, South
Carolina, Georgia,
and Florida
to accommodate the federal footprint.
Where’s the leadership?
Can any reasonable elected leader
anywhere deny the impact to the economy if an area equating to the Northeast
and the entire eastern seaboard is retired from productive endeavors? Could a
single leader today or any day stand on his perch and advocate the expansion of
such a travesty when national debt is $17 trillion, unemployment remains at
some contrived, dishonest reporting level, and 11 States are managing the trend
toward supporting more welfare recipients than gainfully employed citizens?
This is a debacle!
Yet, leaders like Tom Udall, Martin
Heinrich, Raul Grijalva, Ben Ray Lujan, Mark Udall, and 400 more like them
advocate, faithfully approve funding, and campaign for sopping up more private
property and saving the last, great places that once existed as multiple use.
Remember their Oaths
Every one of these leaders swears
an oath of office upon being elected.
In one form or another, that oath
captures the following:
“I ____________, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution
of the United States (and the Constitution of the State on the part of the
state representatives) and that I will
faithfully and impartially discharge the duties of the office of which I am
about to enter, to the best of my ability, so help me God.”
The time has past that we must
realize the pledges rendered in the mere repetitive recapitulation of these
words has long been verbalized hypocrisy. There is no constitutional basis for
the actions of leaders who willfully and purposely follow their party line in
perpetuating and exacerbating this assault on the American citizen. What is most tyrannical is the corrupting nature
of robbing that citizen with the very armor that protects him and his United States
from leadership that not only fails to read the legislation they pass, but
fails to read and defend the Constitution of which they bear false witness.
Indeed, Jefferson
was right. He not only perceived the mirrored protection of the cornerstone, he
revealed its genius. Americans, vested in private property, will not only
defend their system, they will protect it from those whose actions harm them or
it.
In its place, Pursuit of Happiness has remained and prevailed.
Again, how can that be defined? The
truth is it wasn’t founded in natural law and remains a meaningless jumble of words.
It is transient, it conveys nothing substantive to the sovereignty of the American
citizen, and it offers no defense against those who harm the system. Those
individuals now populate leadership halls in abundance.
Whether or not that can be fixed
remains unanswered, but … Jefferson had a
solution for that, too.
Stephen
L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New
Mexico. “Excluding tribal and military reservations, federal
ownership of lands equates to the entire country east of the Mississippi. When the reservations are added,
they would in addition consume Texas, Hawaii,
and all of the U.S.
island territories.”
Property
is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the
central institution of a free society ~ David Friedman
Among
the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life;
secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support
and defend them in the best manner they can. ~ Samuel Adams
All power is originally
vested in, and consequently derived from, the people. That government is
instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which
consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty and the right of acquiring
property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. ~ James Madison
Every
Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but
himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are
properly his. The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into
Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of
their Property. ~ John Locke
Resistance to sudden
violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of
my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered
to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not
surrender if I would. ~ John Adams
The
very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from
the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the
reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal
principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty,
and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and
assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote;
they depend on the outcome of no elections. ~ Justice Robert H. Jackson
The
makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to
the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their
beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They
conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the
most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized
men. ~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis
As
long as the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate
property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to
participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to
use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant,
and all-absorbing. There will be fighting to gain access to the legislature as
well as fighting within it. ~ Frederick Bastiat
The
theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private
property. ~ Karl Marx
No comments:
Post a Comment