No Foraging in the King's Forest Because It Hurts The Peasants

Let's Talk About 'Public' Land
by Eric Blair

Conveniently hidden in the noise of the Bundy Ranch standoff is the heart of the issue: property rights and use of government-owned land. With the federal government going on a land-grab spree of late, it's time we have a frank discussion about "public" land.

What is it? Who owns it? What's it used for? What rights do citizens have to use it?

Back in feudal times peasants weren't allowed to forage in the king's forest. Those caught poaching to feed their families were put to death. It was considered stealing private property from the king himself, not the kingdom as a whole, no matter how big his forest grew. No one claimed it hurt other peasants to take from the king. Yet, today, we are to believe that foraging on government land somehow hurts the kingdom.

Some citizens call rancher Bundy a tax cheat, saying he's stealing from taxpayers because he hasn't paid grazing fees on public land. Does this group view public property as profit centers? Do they know they're advocating for the same thing as big oil companies, frackers, Harry Reid's Chinese solar power plant and a host of other cronies who don't give a damn about land preservation? Because these entities dutifully pay their fees for their "right" to use public lands.

I'm not here to stick up for Cliven Bundy. His family claims they've had foraging rights to government land in Utah since 1877. Ironically, that's right around the time that the government violently stole the land from native Americans. So, ancestor Bundy used the government cavalry to do to them exactly what the BLM is doing to him at the behest of Harry Reid's corporate endeavors. I'm just keeping it real.

Does this mean that land rights only exist for people who can defend property with weapons? It certainly seems that way. To be fair, native Americans never understood "private" property until they were forced to, but they did respect tribal boundaries which they too defended with force.

Historically, property rights were recognized when someone put their labor to the land by building a house from the trees or managing a herd on the fields. The right to use the land became "ownership" and could only be claimed by an individual or a family who worked the land. In the example of feudal times the king displayed ownership the forest because he protected it with force. Significantly, the kingdom did not own the forest because no one could even begin to understand that concept.

Today property ownership comes with very few rights without permission from, or paying fees to, the government. For example, I used to pay around $7000 a year in property taxes for a modest home and three average cars that I supposedly "owned". I also had to buy permits to paint my house, to finish a room my basement, to cut down trees or burn brush in my yard. I paid this money to the kingdom because they claimed a right to my property.

Increasingly people are being prevented from foraging (keeping a garden or chickens) on their own land as if it belonged to the king. It's apparent that when property rights become privileges, the grantor of those privileges becomes the real owner of the land. But what happens when the grantor is a vague collective called the public? A king can be removed, while the "public" cannot.

Is all government land "public"? Of course not. Try hiking around the NSA data center in Utah and see what happens. Try entering Yellowstone National Park without paying the $25 entry fee and see what happens. As a taxpayer (peasant), you have absolutely no rights to that land, therefore you and other citizens are not the owner of that property - but you did pay for it.

The simple truth is if you don't have a right to use the land, you don't own it. Claiming that not paying our fair share for using the king's land (including our own homes) is akin to treason against the kingdom is a colossal mind-control victory for our rulers. People who believe this truly cannot see the chains that bind them.

Well, on a positive note, at least we have all this "public" land to sell real cheap to our creditors when the US economy goes the way of Greece, right?

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TSA Abuses: Seeing the Forest and the Trees

by Anthony Gregory, The Future of Freedom Foundation

The Transportation Security Administration is finally getting some of the bad publicity it deserves. We read about an elderly woman forced to remove her adult diaper to go through the screening process. We learn about a mentally disabled passenger deprived of his harmless toy by a sadistic policy, if not sadistic TSA agents. We see pictures of women and little children being felt up, all the while Americans stand by, seemingly helpless to do anything about such humiliations. A whole country has been conditioned to these summary body scans and pat downs, these invasions of bodily integrity that would have unlikely been tolerated in the era before 9/11, a memory that grows dimmer by the day.

Under Obama, conservatives once again pose as advocates of liberty, increasingly expressing outrage about TSA abuses. They are right to be angry. We could ask where they were almost ten years ago when their president, George W. Bush, oversaw the creation of this national monstrosity. More to the point, we should note that their critique hardly goes far enough and is somewhat misdirected.

The conservatives complain that grandmas and helpless children are being abused, and instead the TSA should pursue a more ?common sense? policy that streamlines unthreatening people through a less-invasive process. Those who obviously don?t ?look like a terrorist? shouldn?t be molested. Sounds good. But what many of them mean is that we need racial profiling, and that Arabs, Muslims, and those from questionable nations should undergo extra scrutiny. Yet this too is objectionable and absurd. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of such people fly in America regularly, and only an infinitesimal fraction are any threat. Why should the government subject innocent Arabs and Muslims to indignities and unreasonable searches without due process? On the other hand, British citizen Richard Reid, the attempted ?shoebomber? of December 2001, didn?t look like a ?typical? terrorist. He was of European and Jamaican descent. TSA agents are simply not equipped to discern who is a threat from who is not, and they never will be. There is no way to guarantee the total security conservatives have spent a decade demanding while preserving the liberty of everyday Americans.

The liberals are even more disgraceful. They spoke up for civil liberties under Bush, decrying the No-Fly list and other such depredations. Now many of them, suspicious of the conservative TSA critics, defend this terrible agency created by Bush and made worse under Obama. They even cheer as TSA agents vote to unionize, as though better compensating these federal employees or making them even harder to fire should be on the top-ten-thousand list of priorities for any humanitarian, as the left claims to be. Even worse, many left-liberals have denied that these screening procedures are intolerably invasive. Some have said those on the No-Fly list should be barred from gun ownership. The same liberals who fret about big business?s threats to the environment and consumer safety defend the TSA full-body-scanner, insisting the health risks are a total fantasy.

In March, USA Today reported that the TSA ?would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation ? 247 machines at 38 airports ? after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.? The same government that many Americans trust to protect their health didn?t even bother to accurately test within an order of magnitude the radiation levels of its equipment before irradiating many millions of Americans and foreigners. And why should anyone be subjected to this risk, no matter how small? Ah yes, for the privilege to fly.

Some will say that this is simply the price we pay for security, but that is a complete illusion. According to ABC reporting last December, TSA diagnostics to determine how many weapons could be snuck past security found that some major airports had a failure rate of 70% and at some airports, "every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners." Nothing has improved since college student Nathaniel Heatwole snuck weapons onto a plane at Baltimore-Washington International Airport back in September 2003 and then emailed his story to the TSA, which took five weeks to find the contraband. A flustered top TSA official insisted, ?Amateur testing of our [security] systems do not show us in any way our flaws.? We know where the vulnerabilities are and we are testing them.? Eight years later, have they addressed these vulnerabilities? A determined terrorist, needless to say, could easily infiltrate a plane with weapons.

No wonder that when terrorists are stopped in their tracks ? the shoebomber of 2001 and the underwear bomber of 2009, for example ? they were frustrated by the private sector, flight crew and customers, and not by TSA. This has happened without major casualties inflicted on the innocent ? unlike the case of Rigoberto Alpizar who in December 2005 was shot multiple times on a Miami runway by two Air Marshalls, who claimed the man had cried out he had a bomb, something none of the passengers corroborated. Moreover, when people actually stop a terrorist incident, it has nothing to do with mass invasions of the personal privacy of millions of airline customers.

Airlines have every reason to protect their property and their customers, which means private security ? not as it was before 9/11, overseen by the FAA, but truly, completely private security ? is the answer. (The recent resignation of the major FAA official due to the scandalous tendency of his air traffic controllers to be caught sleeping on the job indicates just how indispensible and crucial that agency is.)

In a free market for security, some airlines might have detailed screening processes. Others might allow guns on planes ? another defensive approach that has been completely neglected. Whether airlines profile or not will be up to them, but customers will demand security without violations of their dignity, and the private sector, unlike government, has all the incentives to deliver on both fronts.

The myopic focus on planes is questionable to begin with. What about other, similarly vulnerable, public locations? Will they come to mirror the authoritarian atmosphere of the airports? The TSA has already terrorized Amtrak passengers and has its eyes set on other ground transportation ? is this really the direction we want this country to go? Recently the agency was even involved at securing a high school prom.

The missing fact in most of the controversy is that TSA is neither truly designed nor institutionally structured to protect us. We are not really surrendering our gels, forgoing our bottled water, or taking off our shoes for our own good. That?s all a ruse. The TSA is an agency whose function, if not intended purpose, is to condition obedience and subservience into the population. It is an arm of the federal police state and cannot be reformed into anything else. It must be abolished totally and nothing short of that will bring liberty back to air travel.

Even more fundamentally, the media and talking heads ? certainly the conservative opponents of TSA ? forget why we have a terrorist threat, such as it is, in the first place: Because the U.S. government is waging imperial wars abroad, slaughtering children, propping up corrupt regimes, overthrowing governments, playing geopolitical favorites, cutting people off of international trade, and generally behaving as the biggest bully in the world. The blowback terrorism that results can never be stamped out so long as the wars continue. Those who criticize the TSA but defend the wars, and those who defend the TSA but question the wars, should recognize they are two sides of the same imperial coin. The same statism behind the degradation of domestic passengers is in play in the dehumanization of foreign civilians bombed from the sky. Washington, D.C., sees itself as master of our lives and ruler of the world. So long as we accept its pretensions to control the planet, we will be treated as imperial subjects are always treated: as mere cogs in the machine, disposable and malleable human livestock, at the very best.
__
Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent Institute, a policy adviser for the Future of Freedom Foundation, and a columnist at LewRockwell.com. Anthony's website is AnthonyGregory.com. Send him email.

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This is the 2nd article I've read this week by Mr. Gregory & from what I discern from his bloviated opinions are more focused on "divide & conquer" than actual solutions. He's a muckracker of the highest order! He never offers a solution, spins & obfuscates his argument until his own point of view prevails. What exactly are the credentials for "research analyst? He knows how to google, good on ya mate!

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