Obama Plans Massive Land Grab

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704543004576051981953491522.html?KEYWORDS=wilderness+policy+sparks+western+ire

Associated Press

The Organ Mountains in Las Cruces, N.M., left, is one of the sites the Bureau of Land Management may seek to preserve under a new federal government initiative aiming to protect more public lands

Obama Plans Massive Land Grab
  by Van Helsing

Nothing better sums up the Left's antidemocratic and antihuman agenda that the Obama Administration's policy of circumventing Congress to seal off our own land from use.

An Obama administration directive designed to preserve more public lands as wilderness is stirring anger in the West, where ranchers, sportsmen and energy companies say they could lose access to acreage they count on for their recreation and livelihood.

The regulatory change … directs the Bureau of Land Management to survey its vast holdings stretching between Alaska, Arizona, California and Colorado, in search of unspoiled back country. The agency can then designate these tracts — potentially millions of acres — as "wild lands."

"Wild lands" are lands expropriated from the human race on behalf of the lizards and chipmunks. If we aren't allowed to use them, they may as well have fallen into the sea. Not only development, but drilling, mining, cattle grazing, and even recreational activities may be forbidden.

Obama's latest power grab does not require legislative approval, but there is something Congress can do, in the unlikely event Republicans show some spine.

House Republicans, who will hold the majority in the new Congress that arrives next week, say they plan hearings on the new policy and perhaps seek to cut funding to the BLM for identifying and managing wild lands.

They had better. Like the nefarious EPA, the BLM exists to grow the government and shrink the economy.

Given the left's disdain for cowboys and for eating the meat we require for proper nutrition, it's unsurprising that ranchers stand to take a beating.

Jim Hagenbarth, a Montana rancher who leases BLM land to graze cattle … fears he might lose some of his leases to wild lands designations, or be barred from such practices as burning off sagebrush to clear room for the grasses that cattle prefer. He also frets that more protected wilderness will mean more habitat for wolves, grizzlies and other predators who occasionally raid his herds.

Libs don't much like the energy industry either…

Kathleen Sgamma, a director of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents 400 oil and natural-gas companies, said the new policy could block promising lands from drilling. The Obama administration has opened several million acres to leases by energy companies but has revoked or restricted other plans to drill on public lands. Ms. Sgamma said that had forced the industry to cancel nearly $4 billion in investment this year alone.

Like the scale of the unaffordable spending Obama has indulged in, the land grab could be massive.

[F]ears are heightened by a draft BLM memo that became public earlier this year outlining strategies for protecting up to 140 million acres of BLM land — an area the size of Colorado and Wyoming combined.

It's hard to measure just how much moonbattery costs us, because you don't miss wealth Big Government never allowed to be created in the first place. But imagine the economic consequences of two productive states disappearing from the union.

Some worry that American land is being used as collateral, and will end up being seized by the communist Chinese when it becomes clear that there is no way we can ever pay back the massive sums of money Obama has been borrowing and squandering. But if ChiComs owned the land, at least the resources wouldn't be completely wasted.

Before the income tax, land sales to the private sector constituted a major source of revenue for the government. Now it works the other way; the government eats up land, growing ever larger as America grows smaller.

Whose West is it, ours or Washington's? Via Big Think.

 

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