Posted on 10/13/2007 4:56:07 AM PDT by reaganaut1
WHITEFISH, Mont. — William P. Foley II pointed to the mountain. Owns it, mostly. A timber company began logging in view of his front yard a few years back. He thought they were cutting too much, so he bought the land. Mr. Foley belongs to a new wave of investors and landowners across the West who are snapping up open spaces as private playgrounds on the borders of national parks and national forests.
In style and temperament, this new money differs greatly from the Western land barons of old — the timber magnates, copper kings and cattlemen who created the extraction-based economy that dominated the region for a century.
Mr. Foley, 62, standing by his private pond, his horses grazing in the distance, proudly calls himself a conservationist who wants Montana to stay as wild as possible.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Will he maintain it or just look at it?
Proper logging is better for the ecology than leaving it primordial.
How quaint. Arrogant rich bastards are so charming. I think his horses crap too much so they need to be shot.
I think buying land so that it can do nothing is dumb. But people can do what they want with their money. The strategy of buying land to get it out of the extraction business is much better than petitioning the government to make the extraction business illegal.
I figure in a generation or two, people will realize that putting the land to good use is just smarter than owning land because it looks pretty.
Worst-case scenario is that the old conservationists give the land to the federal government to avoid property taxes. Then it's off the market forever.
So what did he do for a living to make all that money?
Good for them. If the land is for sale, there’s nothing wrong with anybody buying it. Put your money where your mouth is; if you want land to stay open, then buy it instead of forcing government (= taxpayers) to buy it for you. This man and people like him are at least doing something useful with their money.
Cheers to William Foley. He’s obviously taken von Mises to heart.
What’s your problem with this? Are you a communist? Do you dislike rich people, or just rich people who buy land? Is someone necessarily arrogant and a bastard because he buys mountain land for his own uses?
It astonishes me that some people on this thread are hostile toward an American who buys land of his own, using his own money, and maintains it as he pleases. That is certainly what I would do if I won the lottery. What’s the point of being rich if you can’t use your own land as you wish? Isn’t that what all the supporters of individual property rights want to see when they insist that landowners be allowed to use the land they own for logging or development? Well, this man and others like him want to use their land for looking at or riding across. It’s his land, he can do as he pleases with it.
Actually I like this better than the enviros trying to prevent owners from developing or logging by using the Endangered Species Act. If they want to keep someone from logging on their own land, they should buy the land.
I have to leave for work but maybe someone can find it in the Times-Standard. See ya later...
Better yet, does he want to adopt me?
If these guys can buy the property for the asking price and pay the YEARLY property taxes without producing anything, then it’s their business.
Morons with money.
If he bought it fair and square it’s his, period.
Real estate, if this is the same guy: TPJ.
He seems to be a West Point graduate and a Bush supporter.
Well, we all know that, period.
I was just asking a question, and I hope that you see no problem with that.
Be careful what you wish for.
Which is more harmful to the environment - clear-cutting or inserting macadam roads, large houses, sewage systems and electrical lines?
When these homes are threatened by catastrophic forest fires, let these folks deal with the problem themselves instead of calling for the government to come and put many lives at risk and spend millions of dollars protecting these homes.
“Which is more harmful to the environment - clear-cutting or inserting macadam roads, large houses, sewage systems and electrical lines?”
Yeah - ‘The good news is that there will be no more logging here. The bad news is we have to bring the whole forest up to code.’
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