Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." Ayn Rand

"Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." Ayn Rand

"The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice', but integrity." Ayn Rand

For "a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" Ayn Rand

21 November 2008

Coming Federal Land Grab

Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader, intends to pass the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2008 in the lame duck session of Congress. As I recently noted, the federal government already owns ridiculously large amounts of U.S. land. See my post of 17 November 2008. This Omnibus ( I am beginning to associate this word with rampant socialism, as I do the word solidarity.) Public Land Management Act will put further restrictions on property ownership and will make it still harder to explore for oil on American soil. How do they get away with such nonsense?

This lard-filled act will put further controls on privately owned land and property. It will buy up still more land to be added to the more than 650 million acres of land the government already mismanages. The act will put aside land for more wild and scenic rivers, create new heritage areas with property use restrictions, and put more land into wilderness areas, along with about 100 additional land-use restriction programs. It will spend $4 billion on pork-barrel spending projects. Of course, it will also create many jobs for more government bureaucrats and require private citizens to file a blizzard of applications to bureaus and offices simply to use their own land and properties.

Who knows what further attacks upon property are hidden in its more than 1,000 pages? We can be sure that Congress does not know and that the courts will be discovering additional federal powers for decades among its pages.

The removal of more land and resources from productive use and the further empowerment of government is to be dreaded by all who believe in the American concept of the sovereign individual.

2 comments:

Serket said...

I found you through a search. This is disturbing, as I also agree that the federal government has more land that they are constitutionally allowed. The percentages are especially high in the West (I guess since we gradually moved in that direction while expanding the country. Since you are an individualist and a scientist, you might enjoy this website: http://darwincentral.org/

Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D. said...

My initial impression of Darwin Central is that it is an interesting site for interesting tidbits of science. I will look around it more later today. Meanwhile, I hope you will visit here in the future. Thanks for your comment.

For now, I am about to run my youngest daughter off to DCA for a flight to Brazil, where she and my oldest daughter are spending a wicked week vacationing.