I found this interesting.
Posted on 07/01/2009 2:52:51 AM PDT by Rodebrecht
I found this interesting.
Doesn’t say much, because if a state has more national parks, it automatically will have more of its land come under Federal authority. Alaska seems like a case of that, exactly.
Cheers!
To: Click on the map to learn who controls gold, silver, and other minerals beneath 9.3 million acres of public and private land in towns, resorts, parks, forests, and wilderness across 12 Western states - a giveaway four times the size of Yellowstone National Park.
The United States government has direct ownership of almost 650 million acres of land (2.63 million square kilometers) – nearly 30% of its total territory. These federal lands are used as military bases or testing grounds, nature parks and reserves and indian reservations, or are leased to the private sector for commercial exploitation (e.g. forestry, mining, agriculture). They are managed by different administrations, such as the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US Department of Defense, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Bureau of Reclamation or the Tennessee Valley Authority.
This map details the percentage of state territory owned by the federal government. The top 10 list of states with the highest percentage of federally owned land looks like this:
Notable is that all these states are in the West (except Alaska, which strictly speaking is also a western state, albeit northwestern). Also notable is the contrast between the highest and the lowest percentages of federal land ownership. The US government owns a whopping 84.5% of Nevada, but only a puny 0.4% of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The lowest-percentage states are mainly in the East, but some are also in the Midwest and in the South:
The truth of this was pointed out to me (by a freeper, I believe) who answered the question of why the libtards so resist our exploitation of our own petroleum reserves. The obvious and simple answer is that "they are not ours", they are collateral to our creditors. When I say the "gummint is broke" that is not quite true. We are in massive debt but the creditiors know there is still great value in our soil, literally. The question is how in the world do they hope to profit? It could turn out to be difficult.
I first posted this several years ago. Alas it is only more drearily true today:
THE POPULATION OF AMERICA HAS DOUBLED IN MY LIFETIME
If you have lost control of your local school system and you believe it is because liberalism is triumphing over conservatism, you are right but you have identified the symptom and not the cause: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you have lost control over your own real property, if your rights to manage, improve, and develop your property have passed over to bureaucrats, if you can no longer choose whom to rent to or whom to sell to, if you have lost confidence that your deed in fee simple absolute will protect you against a venal government or one wholly given over to interest groups, and for all of this you blame liberalism, you have identified the symptom but not the cause: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you are a rancher who has lost his rights to graze his cattle upon lands licensed to his family for generations, if you're a fox hunter who has been deprived of his sport, if you must wait three hours for a tee time, if you have given up taking the family to the Jersey shore because the travel time now exceeds three hours, if, after hours of travail, you finally arrive at the Jersey shore with your family and you find your neighbors to close, too numerous, polyglot, and uncongenial, know this;The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you look at Broward and Palm Beach counties in Florida as-miracle of the jet age-suburbs of New York City, and you watch helplessly as the politics of these counties veer ever farther left potentially dragging all Florida and, with Florida, the soul of the Republican Party in America, be advised: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If, as a parent or grandparent, you find yourself mightily boring your children or grandchildren with descriptions of how Christmas used to be, descriptions of a time gone by when shopkeepers were permitted to say, "Merry Christmas," when Christmas carols were really that, carols, when the public square was a place for the exuberant celebration of the birth of Christ, rather than a forum for the celebration of the pagan, then you instinctively know: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you are old enough to remember America before the vietnamization of America, then you must love your country and you see her "a shining city on the hill" as the last best hope for men.
A few posts back one can read an article about a neighborhood uproar over the conversion of a horse ranch into a an upscale housing development. The author and the posters lament the loss of open green spaces. No one apart from me, your humble reactionary, sought to connect our feverish conversion of open spaces into more modern and admittedly upscale Levittowns with our quarter century policy of virtually open immigration.
How many tens of millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, have come to America in the last quarter century? How many millions of children have they brought into our society? Presumably there were all housed. The earlier generations, financially better established no doubt, do what Americans have always done as an immigrant wave occupies the cities, they move out to the burbs and seek higher quality housing, especially housing with cul-de-sacs.
The greater issue here is not cul-de-sacs, nor preservation of horse farms discussed on the earlier thread, but who gets to decide how we control our land-use. If you are a conservative you ought to consider that your freedom to use your land is you see fit, to build on a cul-de-sac or to maintain horses, or even dogs, is much less in a society with 300 million people than it was in a society of only 140 million people which was our population at the time of my birth. Your individual property rights must inevitably give way to the sheer weight of numbers.
If you are a conservative who values your property rights, you should be as aggressive in fighting immigration, both legal and illegal (although not limited legal immigration based on skills), as you all are in defense of a Second Amendment right to bear arms.
Good point. Add to that the idea that beyond the 13 colonies, much of the land came into U.S. possession as government-owned land (acquired from Britain, France, Mexico, or Native Americans). A large portion of that was sold to speculators who divided it into parcels to be sold to settlers.
If you look at the arable lands, you get a feel for where the most-desired land for settlers was located -- less government-owned land resulted in more purchase of government lands for farming or mining. The map tends to support that.
Interesting - I never thought of it that way, there must be SOME type of collateral.
But how can we prove that? There has to be some sort of paper-trail that is publicly accessible.
Anyone out there know the source of this theory, can it be proven?
And the proportion of those on AFDC (which didn't exist before) has done what?
And the proportion of those on Medicaid (which didn't exist before) has done what?
And the proportion of those on Medicare (which didn't exist before) has done what?
And the proportion of those on Food Stamps (which didn't exist before) has done what?
And the proportion of bureaucrats who support the above programs (which didn't exist before) has done what?
And the number of rogue states with Nukes (which didn't exist before) has done what?
And the number of illegal immigrants (which didn't exist before) has done what?
And the number of taxes (which didn't exist before) has done what?
And the number of tax payers (which won't exist soon) has done what?
Cheers!
The feds own way more that national parks in the west.
The solution to California’s budget crisis!!!!
Assess property taxes on federal land...
hh
ML/NJ
At least here in the Northwest Territories (historical reference to the Great Lakes region), the federal government became the de facto “owner” of the land as it was appropriated through various treaties. The original settlers bought the land (or received it in grants) from the government, and occasionally, speculators. Any land that was unsold remained the property of the government. The western lands, especially arid lands, would find few buyers— so it is not suprising that the feds continue to own deserts and mountains, as well as range land...
hh
...
They'll be able to override the millions of laws and regulatons that have stymied US owners, because they'll own the government.
Can you imagine China giving a rip about the endangered squawfish ? Or demanding eco-friendly logging of our timber ?
They'll just laugh.
Well said. It’s no wonder people here in Jersey are living on top of each other.
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