The controversy between the federal government and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy appears to have receded from the front pages for the moment, but it is useful to step back and ask a simple question: how come these highly charged political standoffs seldom if ever occur in New York, or Pennsylvania, or Indiana? How come there is no “Cornbelt Rebellion” to match up with the west’s “Sagebrush Rebellion”?
The answer is simple: the federal government owns very little of the land in the eastern United States. Except for a few national parks and military bases, virtually all of the land east of the Mississippi River is privately owned, and while private land everywhere is subject to numerous regulations, private owners don’t have to ask permission or obtains leases from federal government bureaucrats to use their land. This is one reason the natural gas boom has occurred so rapidly in Pennsylvania and Texas, while gas production continues to lag on federal land out west.
The federal government owns less than 1 percent of the land of New York (ditto for Iowa); only 2.5 percent of Pennsylvania, and 9.9 percent of Virginia. The largest federal landholding by share is New Hampshire, where the feds own 13.4 percent of the land. Contrast this with the western and Rocky Mountain states, where the federal government often owns half or more of the total land area. The feds own 61.9 percent of Alaska, 45.3 percent of California, 57 percent of Utah, and 84.5 percent of Nevada. (The only western state where the federal government owns little land is Texas, at 1.9 percent—a fact that is probably a major factor in Texas’s booming energy economy.) Increasingly the bureaucrats in Washington are constricting public use of federally owned land. There’s a mountain of evidence that federal agencies badly mismanage the 700 million of acres of land under its control; in other cases, endless litigation from environmental groups prevent sensible active management of public lands. While private forest owners can clear dead and downed trees to reduce fire risk and promote forest health, federal forest managers are blocked at every turn from sensible forestry practices.
Once upon a time the land east of the Mississippi River was owned by the federal government, too, but the federal government devolved the land to the states after each state achieved statehood. The congressional enabling acts that created the individual states all contained language that called for the federal government to transfer title to the land from the federal government to the states. This is true right down to the 50th state, Hawaii, whose enabling law from Congress states that “the United States grants to the State of Hawaii, effective on its admission into the Union, the United States’ title to all the public lands and other public property within the boundaries of the State of Hawaii, title to which is held by the United States immediately prior to its admission into the Union.”
This process started with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that created the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The process of devolution of federal lands to new states began to stall out in the middle of the 19th century. For example, the federal government owned 90 percent of Missouri and Florida for decades after their admission to the Union as states.
When the federal government started dragging its feet, midwestern states complained to Washington that the inability to tax or develop federally owned land constricted both the economies and public capacities of the states. Missouri’s legendary Senator Thomas Hart Benton (1872-1858) played a key role in breaking up the federal monopolization of land in the news states, because, he argued, “like all monopolies, [federal ownership] resulted in hardships to those upon whom it acted.” Sen. Benton was relentless in his hectoring of the federal government to dispose the land it owned in the states at the time, and today the federal government owns only 5 percent of Missouri.
The Federal Taylor Grazing Act of 1934—one of the laws which has snared Cliven Bundy—provided for federal management of rangeland “pending its final disposal” to the states. But in 1976 a very liberal Congress (that was back when Democrats enjoyed a two-thirds majority in both houses) decided, in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, that the federal government would retain ownership of the land it held in the various states. This has crimped the fiscal outlook of many states, as state-owned lands are often managed explicitly to support public schools or other public purposes—not to mention the massive mineral and energy resources that are currently locked up on western federal lands. Hardly anyone is aware that since the 1976 act the federal government has made payments to the states (and especially rural counties) in lieu of the tax revenue or other economic benefit they lost by not having the land transferred to them. Essentially the federal government is paying western states not to use the land within their borders—a fiscal practice that is likely unsustainable in the long term.
Today the role of Thomas Hart Benton is being played by Utah State Representative Ken Ivory (R-Sandy), who has successfully urged several western state legislatures to pass resolutions asking the federal government to turn over land to the states. Some states are threatening to sue the federal government to expedite the process—likely a long shot, but the fervor of some western states behind the idea shows that the “Sagebrush rebellion” was alive and kicking long before the Bundy episode put it back on the front pages. Ivory has started the American Lands Council to help organize the effort across states.
The federal government and its client interests—mostly environmental ideologues—have evinced a steadily growing hostility to residents of the west. But even in the absence of bad policy, devolution of land to the states or, better still, to private owners is a matter of republican principle: a self-governing people need to own and control the land precisely in order to be self-governing in the fullest sense of the term. Private or local control of land also tends toward inculcating responsibility—another key trait of self-government. It’s the surest means of preventing the next Bundy-style confrontation from spiraling into violence, which is surely going to happen one of these days.