Victory! American rancher and armed militias force US Federal Govt to stand down

[-:Undertaker:-]

No but I pay road tax for the government to take care of the roads, and if I own cattle which I wish to make a profit from I would have to pay tax so the government can hire inspectors to insure health and safety policy is being kept to. Pretty standard stuff. It's not as if the land was being used for recreational use, there was a lot of money being made there from a service being sold to the public.

And the land is good for what otherwise? See, this is the stupidity of statists - you and the state would rather take on a business owner who is funding you (the state) and employing people/creating wealth because his cattle DARE to graze on some land that the Federal Government holds in trust for everybody. Even more stupid is the fact that you've also spent millions of dollars on going after a family who have been using the land for over a century..... losing the 'public' money that it cannot afford to lose.

For those reasons, we both know this isn't about the state getting money back for the public just because Mr Bundy is profiting - that's total ********. The state never cares about giving money back to the people who create it, all it cares about is more money & power for itself.

If you ask me then land like that which the state owns (and can do nothing with - mainly because government is impossible in creating any wealth and can only destroy wealth) should be sold or transferred even to people like Bundy who will make economic use of it.

[The Don]

So we should let people get away with crimes because it might be expensive to go after them? Ok then. It wasn't a small sum he owed either, it was over a million dollars. The time he's used the land is irrelevant because he's never owned it. If I wish to use land I will follow the rules to do so. You can dress the issue however you want, you don't get to pick and choose which taxes you pay, if I disagree with the government going to war with another country that doesn't mean I can then remove the percentage spent on military funding from my tax payment.

[-:Undertaker:-]

So we should let people get away with crimes because it might be expensive to go after them?

It shouldn't be a crime in the first place and the federal government shouldn't own the land.

Ok then. It wasn't a small sum he owed either, it was over a million dollars. The time he's used the land is irrelevant because he's never owned it. If I wish to use land I will follow the rules to do so. You can dress the issue however you want, you don't get to pick and choose which taxes you pay, if I disagree with the government going to war with another country that doesn't mean I can then remove the percentage spent on military funding from my tax payment.

In my eyes, you do not owe anything really to the government. A system of government should depend on the state doing the bare minimum (defence mainly, head of state, parliament, law enforcement and that's about it) and everything else - including land ownership - should be left to individuals rather than the state which itself is just a collection of powerful individuals. I would have pretty much all state land sold.

I'm not dressing it up at all - as I said before, if the state started charging people for walking on state land or wanted to charge you for advertising your car for sale on the pavement - then I would call that a gross overstep of state power that ought to be resisted. Whether Mr Bundy allows his cattle to graze on some worthless desert land or not is questionable as to whether it's the business of the state government let alone the federal government which certainly doesn't have the constitutional mandate to have such powers.

As I said, typical statism - shooting us all in the foot (because we pay for it) just so the state can exert (unconstitutional) control. I'd like to see the reaction of the American cowboys back after the Revolution against British oppressive rule to the idea that they have to pay the federal government a dollar per cattle per month to graze on desert land.... something tells me that there would've been another revolution the following day.