The Pasture is Prologue
15th April 2014
Mark Steyn looks at the Bundy incident in Nevada.
These are low-level bureaucrats from a minor branch of the vast bottomless alphabet soup of federal agencies, and they’re running around pretending to be elite commandos. The county sheriff is supposed to be “the law”. But he had to broker a deal to get the BLM out of there because in America every jumped-up pen-pusher from the Bureau of Compliance has his own branch of “the law”, a personal SWAT team to act as judge, jury, executioner and, if necessary, as in Nevada, as army of occupation. In most parts of the developed world, there is “the police”, and that’s it. If a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Paperwork wants to have you seized, he has to persuade a judge to issue a warrant and then let the local coppers handle it as they see fit. There is an obvious conflict of interest when every tinpot regulatory agency has its own enforcement arm, and it imputes to even legitimate cases the whiff of something malodorous and, indeed, despotic.
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It reminds me of 19th century Ireland, when most of the big estates belonged to absentee landlords in England. It’s an even less attractive arrangement when the absentee landlord is a distant national government. There is no need for the vast land holdings of the United States Government, especially given their ever more unpleasant and bullying attitude to public access to the land. As I’ve said, a 21st century America has fewer rights on “the people’s land” than a 13th century English peasant had in the King’s forest. If I ever do run for Senate in New Hampshire, my platform will include a pledge to return the White Mountain “National Forest” to the people of the state.