The war in Kosovo was case in point (see DTT May,
1999). The president had committed the United States armed forces to an
increasingly dangerous military conflict without a formal declaration of
war. The power to declare war is expressly vested in Congress by our
Constitution. How is it the executive branch is able to circumvent the
approval of the representatives of the American people for making war?
The answer lies in understanding a fundamental
difference between free societies and totalitarian societies. A free
society is of necessity based on private ownership of property. In other
words, in a free society the people own the resource base: the land. All
wealth derives from the land, and by extension, the sea. A free society is
maintained on the principle that the people, not the government, own the
wealth. Funding of government projects is accomplished through taxation of
the people’s wealth—by the consent of the governed. A government which
must come to the citizens for its operating budget is a government which
must listen to what the citizens have to say.
The United States was founded on this very principle.
Those lands generally to the west of the original thirteen states and east
of the Mississippi river were held in common by the states. When these
"common fund lands" were conveyed to the federal government by
the states after the Revolutionary War, they were conveyed with strict
restraints on their future disposition. Congress could only sell these
lands to actual settlers. The proceeds from these sales could be used for
only one purpose: to retire the Revolutionary War debt. Congress was
strictly prohibited by the articles of conveyance from retaining these
lands as a federal asset or from using these lands as a collateral base to
secure a perpetual debt.
The European bond holders who had financed the
Revolutionary War were generally in favor of a policy which would secure
the debt by a mortgage on the western lands and resources of the new
United States. This had been a practice of long standing in Europe. It
gave European banks and financiers considerable control over the nations
and peoples whose lands and resources they had thus encumbered.
A paramount concern of the people of the new nation was
to avoid the kind of political and military conflicts of Europe which were
largely caused by nations borrowing against their land and natural
resources to wage war. Bankers could finance both sides of a conflict.
Whichever nation was victorious could find itself owing both debts plus
interest on the debt. If the debt was not paid, the creditor had access to
the wealth of natural resources which secured the debt. If a nation
resisted the creditors access to its mines, timber, crop lands, grazing
lands and fisheries, the creditor could finance another indebted nation to
make war on the recalcitrant mortgagee.
Under the European monarchist system, the king was the
ultimate title holder of all land and resources. The individual subject
controlled land or natural resources on conditional privilege from the
crown. Consequently, if the crown determined to mortgage the land of a
subject to finance a foreign venture or internal project, the subjects’
hold on the land could be lost if the crown defaulted on the debt.
The founders of the United States constitutional form
of government were careful to create a system which would guard against
control of our natural resource wealth by foreign interests. They created
a system of government based on the principle of absolute private
ownership of the resource base. This they felt was the best safeguard
against the federal government ever gaining the power to act independently
against the will of the people.
For the first ninety years of the United States’
existence, an effective effort was maintained to pay foreign debt rather
than collateralize debt. This policy was made possible by an ever
expanding frontier whose lands and resources could be sold to settlers and
entrepreneurs. By the end of the Civil War, two basic factors in the
American equation had changed. Number one, the United States was faced
with their largest external debt ever, and number two, the arid far
western frontier consisted of a limited supply of lands which could be
sold for revenue under the existing land disposal laws.
A policy that formally began in 1866, eventually
evolved into a system of land disposal which was at once designed to allow
collateralization of debt while preventing an actual occupation of the
land by foreign or unwanted interests. The policy of split estate disposal
of the West’s mineral lands allowed settlement of the surface of these
vast regions of arid lands while retaining the mineral estate by the
federal government for separate disposal under the mining laws. This
system of land disposal not only made possible the collateralization of
the outstanding debt, it also gave the federal government a source of
revenue independent from direct taxes on the citizens of the United
States. The age of United States imperialism with its attendant deficit
spending had been born.
Throughout this period of transition in government
policy from one of government land disposal to the current policy of
federal land retention and confiscation, debt and deficit have grown
correspondingly. Congress and the courts exercised considerable constraint
on debt accumulation and private property confiscation for the sixty years
following the Civil War. Congress and the courts stopped the "India
Plan" of the 1870’s, designed to collateralize transcontinental
railroad debt with western grazing lands and water. Congress and the
courts defeated essentially the same scheme marching under the name of
reclamation, in 1890.
The conservation movement of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, however, accomplished the nationalization of
vast areas of natural resources in the West and Alaska. It took the form
of national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, etc.
Nonetheless, both Congress and the courts fought to protect private
interests in these lands so nationalized.
By the 1960’s, however, private property confiscation
had come into its own under the banner of environmentalism. Ownership is
defined as control of property rights. If government controls the use of
property through regulation, then government, for all practical purposes,
owns that property. What government owns it can mortgage.
Today, resource agencies of the federal government have
become the tools of the environmental movement. The environmental movement
performs the function of transferring land and natural resources from
private interests to government ownership and control under the guise of
protecting the environment. The environmental movement is primarily funded
by the same international financial interests who hold the major portion
of the U.S. treasury debt.
Congress and the courts over the past thirty years have
increasingly turned from their constitutional duty to protect the property
of the citizens, and have increasingly passed the laws and rendered the
decisions which are making the wholesale plunder of the people’s
property possible.
A totalitarian form of government is premised on
government ownership of the wealth. If government owns or controls the
land and natural resources, as opposed to private property, it controls
the wealth. A government which has acquired sufficient collateral base to
fund its own initiatives through borrowing against what once was the
people’s property, no longer has to listen to what the people or the
people’s elected representatives have to say; whether it be the war in
Kosovo or any other matter. V
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his article first printed in
Liberty Matters Journal in Fall, 1999. Wayne Hage is a highly
respected author and is a Director of Stewards of the Range. His book, Range
Wars is considered by many in the legal profession to be a benchmark
in defining property rights on federal lands. Mr. Hage is currently suing
the federal government for violating his property rights in a landmark
case. He has won every appeal to date.