Saturday, December 21, 2013

America -- the land of Opportunity -- owned by the Federal Government

Did you know that about a third of the land mass of the USA, basically all the states from Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico west to the Pacific, is owned by the Federal Government. 80% of Nevada is Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land.The State and private owners control 20%.

According to the Congressional Research Service's Federal Land Ownership report of February 8, 2012, The Fed. Government controls the following percentage of land in the following western states: 
Alaska -------------- 61.8%, 
Arizona ------------- 42.3%
California ----------- 47.7%
Colorado ----------- 36.2%
Dist. of Columbia --- 21.6%
Hawaii  ------------- 20.3%
Idaho --------------- 61.7%
Montana ------------ 28.9%
Nevada ------------- 81.1%
New Mexico ------- 34.7%
Oregon ------------- 53.0%
Utah ---------------- 66.5%
Washington --------- 28.5%
Wyoming ----------- 48.2%

The government is broke and deeply in debt. The people are unemployed in greater numbers than ever seen in the USA, land prices are sky high. In one decade I watched a $50,000 house sale value shoot to greater than double, all from simple speculation and market manipulation by government lending organizations.Higher prices = far greater mortgage interest payments and the wealth transfer accelerated like seen only when money markets are manipulated by the powers that control the money supply.

Wealth transfer. That is what the government wants to control and they know that land is the most secure wealth there is along with gold and silver reserves, and perhaps precious stones and art but art takes a lot of room and stones are a very specialized market. What the government wants is enough control over land so as to control the most precious commodities -- food and manufacturing materials. Housing is important, too, but the government knows they can cram people into tight little "flats", stuffing 50+ people to an acre of land.

What does this have to do with you? Everything. With the Government having so much control over so much of the land, space that produces nothing, property no one works or mines or drills or grows anything on, all we get from this land is the cost of management with no return. Great loss if not complete loss of trillions per year, not just from actual costs but also from lost possible yield if people were allowed to work the land. That is Dead Loss.

The solution is to bring back the Homestead Act that President Abraham Lincoln pushed through Congress and the Senate, or something akin to it where people could obtain for a very small fee a substantial piece of property to work and make productive. The Homestead Act remained in effect until it was repealed in 1976, with provisions for homesteading in Alaska until 1986. Alaska was one of the last places in the country where homesteading remained a viable option into the latter part of the 1900s.  I sought to homestead a place shortly after getting out of high school 1974 only to find the opportunity had been repealed just months before I began considering the option. Boy, was I angry! 

To think that for more than 100 years America had grown and prospered under the Lincoln Homestead Act and with so much of the west still unsettled and unproductive the government had "seen fit" to repeal the act. What a crying shame.

Call, write or email your elected representatives and the whole presidential administration instructing them to reinstitute the Homestead Act or create an equivalent version and implement it as soon as possible. If they will do this America will soon be back on the path of prosperity because people will begin thinking of working for themselves and being productive for themselves again instead of just working a job for someone else. That was the American Dream -- to build your own "empire", no matter the size. 

Will the government actually allow it? 

I'll keep you posted.
Cameron

No comments: