Colonial era alive right here
Published 7:50 pm, Friday, August 23, 2013
To the left of the 100th meridian west, the federal government is large and in charge.
Washington controls more than 40 percent of the acreage in nine states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming.
The feds' total holdings are literally immeasurable. A 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service found that a reliable figure "is not definitively known." A safe estimate is 650 million acres -- nearly 30 percent of the nation.
Outside the West, land is overwhelmingly in the hands of homeowners, business, trusts, states and municipalities. In the East, the feds control minuscule portions of Connecticut (0.3 percent), Maine (1.1 percent), and Pennsylvania (2.1 percent). The story's the same in the South -- e.g., Texas (1.8 percent), Alabama (2.7 percent) and South Carolina (4.6 percent). Even in the Midwest, federal control is weak: Iowa (0.3 percent), Ohio (1.1 percent) and Missouri (3.8 percent).
A new analysis by the Nevada Policy Research Institute explores the origins of the West's enfeebled sovereignty.
Steven Miller, the free-market think tank's vice president for policy, writes that it all started with a broken promise. When Nevada joined the union in 1864, Washington pledged that it would have "equal footing" with the 35 states that came before it. Yet the federal government did not dispose of deed-free property within Nevada, as was its approach with earlier entrants. Excess land had heretofore been put on the market, with unsold parcels transferred to state governments. The process, Miller writes, opened "great expanses of the soil to settlement, commerce, the building of communities, and eventually, to state and local taxation."
It was easy to unload fertile, water-rich land, Nebraska historian John Carter told Miller. But Western states were dry and often sandy. Growing crops was next to impossible in most places, and for viable ranching, the Homestead Act's 160-acre allotment was far too small. Thousands of acres were necessary. Unfortunately, as NebraskaStudies.org explains, Eastern fedpols "couldn't fathom why anyone would need so much space."
Take a lack of understanding of the need for giant spreads and add a growing "progressive" vision of government management of "natural resources." The result is a West that continues to be dominated by federal masters.
Can D.C.'s land-hogging last? Perhaps not. Pro-home rule, pro-growth and pro-taxpayer Westerners have had enough. Utah is walking point on a revival of the Sagebrush Rebellion, and although its effort is dismissed by the environmental left, its crusade is not quixotic.
Defenders of the status quo cite language in the Western states' enabling acts. Nevada's is typical. It stated that its inhabitants "do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands ... and that the same shall be and remain at the sole and entire disposition of the United States."
Miller notes that the passage makes the case for loosening federal control seem awfully thin. But he observes that similar clauses were in effect for several non-Western states. The reason is obvious: "(F)or the federal government to be able to sell those lands, title on them had to be clear. No market existed for encumbered properties with clouded titles."
In an interview with Miller, Utah Assistant Attorney General Anthony Rampton averred that disclaiming unoccupied land "was the vehicle by which disposal was going to be accomplished. It's not an obstacle to disposal, it's the vehicle by which disposal was going to be accomplished."
"What also is frequently not understood today," Miller writes, "is that would-be states such as Nevada were eager to disclaim title because they had a significant financial interest in the federal government selling the unappropriated lands. While most of the revenues from those land sales were to be kept by the federal government ... all the enabling acts also specified that significant revenues from those sales were to go to the new states for education, roads and a multitude of other public improvements."
Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada -- pressure is building to force the federal government to keep the commitments it made to Western states when they entered the union. If Washington won't sell its properties, the argument goes, it should at least transfer them to state governments, which are more responsive and accountable to local voters than fedpols from Minnesota, Maryland, and Massachusetts.
Colonialism in America, thought dead in the 18th century, lives on in the 21st. Let's kill it for good this time.