Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Federal Lands in the West

http://www.perc.org/articles/us-department-land-hogging

Good insight for those with enough thoughtfulness to get past the lothsome free places to hunt mentality.

DSC is already crying about this!!!

When the author used the welfare state of New Mexico as an example I knew it was BS.

The Federal Government should not own land.

I'd hate to see the wreckage if they didn't!

So, you trust the Federal Government more than your State?

I'll take management by the federal government over selling it off by state level hacks.

We'll do our best to keep the Federal Government more conservative than your State's.

I read somewhere, I think that it was in a BLM publication, that they spent $89.2M to manage 155M range/grazing acres in 2014, about $0.58 per acre. They earned $12.1M, about $0.08 per acre. So BLM's management cost tax payers about $0.50 per range/grazing acre, around $77M. Year after year after year, etc.

politicians are politicians, state level just seems to be easier to buy than federal.

The Fed or the states don't manage land as well as private owners - AS A RULE.
That said, the .gov folks own some very rough, hard to make produce (economically) property.
Folks back east should have some of their property taken (without promises being kept) - to see what has fired up many out here.
Maybe if Queens was seized by the Feds, some east of the Mississippi River could understand a little better.
Gov entities also don't pay into the coffers what private owners do - so the western states are at a disadvantage from the get-go.

Miracle of miracles, I actually agree with RL.

I reckon that's one of those things that's hard for Texans to understand. When we negotiated joining the United States, one of our most important requirements was that the Federal Government could not control land in the State that we didn't allow them to, with the exception of National Security reasons.

Most folks that have lived their loves near public land are going to see this issue thru much different eyes that those from the east that have not.

State's will sell large portions, it sure as I write this, Feds are going to find that more difficult.

That's to bad as you havn't a clue what we have here in the west.

Everyone says we should be more like Europe, disposing of public lands would be the quickest way to get there. Wouldn't take much for PETA and the HSUS to finish off hunting after that.

Colorado politicians would sell their mothers if there was a dollar in it for them. Been living here for 60 years and my take is it is one of the crookedest states around. Worse is that the ones in power are all pilgrims.

Being that most of the western US was purchased from other countries by the Federal government, excluding Tx which was it's own republic, Hawaii another one probably. It's a totally different issue.

Kent