From the Easy Chair

Federal Lands Privatized

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 101-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CA143

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CA143, Federal Lands Privatized, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is Easy Chair number 253, November the fifth, 1991.

This evening I, R. J. Rushdoony, Otto Scott and Douglas Murray will be discussing a subject that I think is going to be increasingly important in the years to come.

I neglected to bring with me a letter from one of you with regard to a new foundation that is being set up, namely, one calling for the privatization of federal lands. Now this seems like a strange cause in this day when the federal possession in some states in the West is as high as 90 percent. And, of course, we have the environmentalists demanding that more and more land be taken from the public and being given to some state or federal agency, in particular, federal agencies.

Within the past couple of months I have read of two or three animals that are supposedly endangered and should be put on the endangered species list here in our part of California. One is a kit fox which is certainly not limited to the area of Stockton where the city was planning to expand, but is fairly common. Some of the animals they want to preserve are not even desirable, but lands are being set aside for their preservation.

Now there is a legal basis for the privatization of federal lands. It is the Constitution. Very few people know much about the Constitution because in the required courses that one takes in high school and at the university level the kind of questions asked are technical ones, the term length for senators, the term length for president and for vice president and for congressmen and the powers of congress in a general way.

But in Article I section eight of the Constitution we read, “The Congress shall have power to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such district, not exceeding 10 miles square, as may by cession of particular states and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States.” Now that has reference, of course, to the formation subsequently of the District of Columbia.

And then it goes on. “And to exercise right authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock yards and other needful buildings.”

In other words, this is a limitation on what land and properties the federal government can own in states. Apart from the post offices and forts, magazines, arsenals, dock yards and other needful buildings. Nothing about vast areas of land.

Now turning to a manual published in 1860, A History and Analysis of the Constitution of the United States by Nathan... Nathaniel C. Towle, T O W L E. In its legal commentary on that particular article—and I won’t take time to quote the sources from various legal decisions—the right of exclusive legislation carries with it the right of exclusive jurisdiction, but the purchase of the lands by the United States for the public purposes within the limits of a state does not of itself oust the jurisdiction or sovereignty of such state over the lands so purchased. The Constitution—this is another decision—prescribes the only mode by which they can acquire land as a sovereign power and therefore they hold only as an individual when they obtain it in any other manner.

In other words, for a good many years in this country’s history the power of the federal government to own land within the states was severely limited and very few people are aware that that is a part of the Constitution. Here in California within my lifetime there was talk about the state in terms of these things that I have just read, taxing all federal properties within the state of California. So we have a great deal of constitutional background for the privatization of federal lands within the states.

Douglas, would you like to comment on the subject?

[ Murray ] Well, I am sure Otto will be able to shine more light on the historical aspect, but what this brings to mind is this wilderness preservation act which is now run amok. And it has been guided and ... and sanctified by the activist courts, successive activist courts that we have had. In effect, they have amended the Constitution without a vote of the states or the people.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... there is something about toll roads in the Constitution also. They ...

[ Rushdoony ] Post roads.

[ Scott ] Post roads. That is... post roads. And that, I suppose was to facilitate the mails...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And things of that sort and the army, the movement of the army and so on. Well, right now to begin with the... where we are, where we are, we are being managed or governed, I guess is a better word, by the agencies. The agencies {?} is creative which are called the fourth branch of government. And they cover every sector, agriculture, manufacturing, the land and so forth. Now the environmental act has been an end run around the control of all that, whether it is private or public. Your land is as much under the control of the federal government as a federal designated land, because if there is an endangered species there, you can be held liable and criminally liable, beginning November the first.

Beginning November the first the United States sentencing agency has laid out a list of criminal penalties for violations of the environmental regulations. They don’t call them laws. They call them regulations. And that means that, for instance, if you are down in San Bernardino County and you happen to have the misfortune to run over a kangaroo rat you can be fined up to 50,000 dollars and given prison time. So really we are talking here of ... when we talk about the Constitution we ... we are not really talking about a living document. We are talking about an end run that has been made around the Constitution by Congress when it set up these agencies and the agencies emit regulations. And these regulations are what govern us, not the common law. The common law is like the common law of England under Charles I. It has been set aside or under, let’s say, Elizabeth or James when the high commission was governing.

We have... we have very little control. We can’t chop a tree. We can’t add a building. We can’t add a room to the house. We can’t build a new house with out special permission. All this is a use of land.

[ Murray ] Well, it is becoming more dictatorial. Before agencies like fish and game and any other public agency they would conduct public hearings and they would get input from the entire spectrum of interested parties. They no longer do that. They promulgate regulations and they tell you this is what it is going to be.

[ Rushdoony ] I am going to refer now to a book by Rexford G. Tugwell.

[ Scott ] Oh. Good for you.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Now ...’

[ Scott ] Brain truster.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Originally a professor of economics, then a part of Roosevelt’s brain trust, governor of Puerto Rico, director of the institute of planning at the University of Chicago and then a senior fellow at the center for the study or democratic institutions. So he has been one of the planners whose influence has never been fully documented on the molding of what we have today. And some 20 years ago he wrote The Compromising of the Constitution: Early Departures. And he documented what I pointed out earlier, although not dealing in particular with the issue I did. And he says, and I quote, “As a result of changed circumstances and their interpretation of need, the Supreme Court has added several rights to the original 10. These are association, movement, privacy, voting and perhaps education. When the Constitution is altered in this way the effect is quite different from forthright amendment,” unquote.

So what Tugwell was calling for was ... since the Constitution was very early bypassed, it doesn’t mean much any more. So we should discard it and start all over again with a new constitution that will give shape and authority to federal power and to all these new rights that have been established by the Supreme Court. So Tugwell was right in this regard. The original constitution has long been a dead letter. The courts have used the words as a pretext to introduce things never even remotely imagined by any of the founding fathers. And with the increasing control of everyone’s property and the extension of federally owned lands in all these states, in effect, we are going back to something that this country revolted against, the development—and Otto referred to it in England—took step by step over the generations and it culminated with the Tudors and Stuarts all power from the people invested in the throne so that the old and original alodial rights of people to property whereby a man had sole ownership of what he owned and the man who is, by the way, doing a remarkable studies in this area together with another man, a lawyer, is John Sauders with Jim Griffith the attorney.

I called attention to the early medieval {?} and to the biblical background whereby the earth could not be taxed because it is the Lord’s and how it was only gradually that the taxation of land came into this country, primarily through the Unitarians who are for state power.

But the old premise that a man’s home was his castle went hand in hand with something last used by a demagogue in our time, Otto, Huey Long. Every man a king. That had deep medieval premises. If your property could not be taxed and if no man could enter upon it without your consent, then you were king over that little domain that was yours. And that was a part of American law. And it has disappeared. Although it is still there, John and Jim tell me, in the common law.

So we have had a moral and a legal revolution which has taken away from us our control of our properties and the states, their ability to control things within their boundaries.

[ Scott ] Well, I have just finished writing an article for a group called the national public policy group in Washington, DC on this issue. Not land specifically, but it is titled “Congress and the Constitution.” And the revolution to which you refer really began here in 1865 with the 39th Congress which was the abolitionist congress which wanted to punish the South and succeeded in doing so and also ran roughshod over Andrew Johnson in the process.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The 40th Congress, the one succeeding that in 1869 forced... they packed the court in order to make the legal tender law legal, because the court had earlier ruled it unconstitutional. And after that there has been a series, step by step. For a while, of course, they were under a strong president, the executive has been stronger. But that has been fairly rare. I mean, we had Theodore Roosevelt to some extent, Wilson to a greater extent, Roosevelt to the greatest extent.

Most of the presidents, however, have been weak men. It is almost as though weakness is one of the qualifications to become a president, because otherwise the party bosses don’t want you. I And setting up the agencies, the agencies have administrative law. You remember you gave me that book by Berman on administrative law. And the biggest leap forward in the growth of agencies and administrative law was under Lyndon Johnson in the 60s.

While all the riots and civil rights brew ha, ha was going on, the administrative center of the government and the bureaucracy was enlarged at an exponential degree to the point where the central government, as such—and I include the court—cannot contend with the bureaucracy. Congress is trying to. It has reorganized itself into committees and subcommittees and each one of them is trying to ride herd on a certain number of agencies. If you get in trouble with one of the agencies and you go to your congressman and that is his big thing, now he can deal with the agency that he is in charge of, so to speak. He is in a wonderful position.

Having created the agency in the first place ad the agency needs Congress in order to get the budget to continue he has great control on that end and then he has control over the constituent because the constituent is in a problem that Congress created for him. So he gets it both ways. Once in a while they go over too far like with the savings and loan people, with Keating. The intervention became a little bit too involved with self interest and with money. But if they hadn't asked for money, the Keating five couldn’t be touched, because they had the perfect right as a Congressman to intervene. That incidentally is a new law, because 20 years or so ago, 30 years or so ago they could go to prison of intervening. But they passed a law, of course, making it possible.

So really what we are talking about is not land alone but the entire American government which is being governed now, you might say, with big brother’s system without big brother.

[ Murray ] You get multiple power centers. I mean, each one of these congressmen is really a king over very large...

[ Scott ] Yes. He is a baron of something or another.

[ Murray ] Exactly.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and the idea behind early American law which appears even in chancellor Kent’s commentaries on the Constitution in the first half of the last century was that every man was lord over his domain, his property. And this is an ancient idea in Christendom, so much so that our word baron is a very familiar word to me because it is in Armenian. It was a word common to Europe and common to Christendom.

If you were a free man you were a baron, if you were a property holder, baron. And this day instead of something like Mr. the Armenians would say baron. You would be Baron Otto Scott, Baron Douglas Murray. That preserved itself.

[ Scott ] I asked my grandfather Scott once if there wasn’t a title I the family. He said, “Yes.”’

I said, “What?”

He said, “Free man.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And that is what hat...

[ Scott ] It was a title.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, Sir Edward Cooke was the one who told James I that every man’s house is his castle. Cooke had a way of inventing law, but he was so learned that nobody could catch him at it. And I don't know whether he invented that saying or whether it was true, but in practical, practical sense it was true.

[ Rushdoony ] It had its roots in the {?} and so it had deep medieval roots. It was something that was deep within Christendom against which local lords and kings had been fighting through the medieval era.

[ Scott ] Well, that was the whole point ad purpose of the aristocracy was to protect the people from the central power, from the king. Centralized power Hamilton warned against it. Jefferson warned against it. Madison warned against it. These were men who had set up a war against the colonies, against the English parliament, not against the king. The king didn’t have any power. Parliament had taken it away. The Declaration of Independence was addressed to the king because they had to personify the war. It was ... Adams called it a war time document. He said there were a number of declarations and he said, “I had a hand in some of them and I don’t know why Mr. Jefferson got so much credit for his.”

[ Rushdoony ] Well, an interesting aspect of that is the United States was never under a parliament. It was under the king. So King George III was King of England, Scotland, Ireland, New York, Virginia and Massachusetts.

[ Scott ] The colonies, in other words.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Each was a little kingdom and only in foreign affairs did the king govern them through parliament. So when parliament attempted to legislate for the colonies that was a revolutionary act. The revolution started in parliament and so the references... I believe there are two oblique references in the Declaration of Independence to Parliament. But it was a declaration of independence from King George III for having violated the constitution or charter of each of the colonies by turning power over to parliament that did not belong to parliament.

[ Scott ] Well, I stand corrected. It is a very good point. But you know that in England parliament took control from the crown.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And that one of the men in parliament, one of the men in commons said, “We can do anything. We can turn a man into a woman if we want to.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Of course, he didn’t know that it would now be possible. But my point really was that the leaders of the founding generation knew that commons was uncontrollable in England. They knew that the Cromwellian revolution had been lost to that extent and they did not want to have an uncontrolled Congress. The didn’t want to have an uncontrolled executive and they didn’t want to have an uncontrolled judiciary.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So when Congress here began to expand its powers and Congress has subjugated the Supreme Court. And I think it is very interesting that it has managed to do it without having ... without being blamed, but the latest {?} Civil Rights Act, for instance, is being passed to change the rulings of the Supreme Court. You know, there are about four rulings in which the court said it was unconstitutional to treat people badly on grounds of discrimination, on being guilty of discrimination. So this particular Congress has decided to change those rulings by enacting new laws. In this manner Congress has both stacked the court and has tried to dominate the court every since 1865. It has also tried to dominate the presidency with a few exceptions. And it has pretty well succeeded.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, we will see if the court rebels against this, because it is a ... a very arrogant move this time.

[ Scott ] Well, now it ... so far its rulings have been every which way. I mean, I... I don’t see anything coherent coming out of it at all. But maybe with Clarence Thomas on there and certainly he... he shouldn’t feel good about Congress.

[ Rushdoony ] No. That is what I hope will be the case.

[ Scott ] Maybe that will swing the matter.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, the power of the federal government over the states has increased to a remarkable point so that there are rebellions here and there. In two states in particular the rebellion is quite marked. In Alaska the governor has been very open about his rebellion against federal controls and federal policies. Wyoming has rejected and is the only state that has maintained its opposition to the one man, one vote premise.

[ Scott ] What is the set up in Wyoming? Is it a bicameral or ...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And each county, irrespective of the number of people it has, has representation in the senate. So...

[ Scott ] That is not one man, one vote.

[ Rushdoony ] No, emphatically not. It is also bucking the federal government, Mexico, California and Arizona on green river water which goes into the Colorado.

So there are examples of resistance, although there are also some examples of surrender.

January Chalcedon Report I ... there will be an exceptionally fine article by R. E. McMaster on the situation in Montana, what the environmentalists and the federal government have been doing there and how it is destroying the future of that state. They want it to revert to wilderness. They are destroying the ranchers and farmers. They have loosed wolves which are really killing machines as R. E. points out quoting authorities on it and grizzlies and other bears are moving out of Yellowstone and other areas all through that area. And the results are devastating.

Now I know years ago when I was on the Indian reservation how deadly bears can be and how they have a lust to kill as wolves do. One sheep, for example, would make a copious meal for a bear for a few days, but when they would come into a flock they would think nothing of killing 20 and 40 at a time for the sheer pleasure of killing.

They enjoyed it. They wouldn’t stop to eat. They would have a blood lust for killing. And this is not recognized. And in some areas people have already been mauled by grizzlies. In this area the bear are moving closer and closer to our areas. A few have been sighted around Vallecito and along the six mile road.

[ Murray ] I was talking to a local game warden. He said it is just a question of time before a child gets mauled by a mountain lion.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, oh they are very...

[ Murray ] They have been moving down... down the hill there below highway 49. They are right over here on locally just west of ... west of us a few miles.

[ Rushdoony ] They are on our place. They are in Sacramento. They have caught them on the university campus there. They are in the back yards of Stockton and these are the young ones, fortunately for those people. But one person has been mauled and the same has happened in Montana with mountain lions increasing because they are protected.

[ Murray ] I was going to cite... excuse me... one other instance of states are now beginning to reject federal highway funds as a means of casting off federal power over their internal jurisdiction. And I think they are two states now that have done that, that have turned down federal highway funds. This has always been the big sort of Damocles hanging over the state’s head. The federal government will tell them that if you don’t do what we tell you to, we are going to cut of the federal highway funds or they will have legislators gang up on their state legislators and they would be denied pork barrel programs, federal funds being spend within that state. And I think the states, some of the states, at least, are beginning to wake up that if they continue to do that they are... they will lose all sovereignty if they ever had any.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, it is also moving into a different area all together. This animal worship.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And nature worship is ... is very strange. I read a letter to the editor. I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, I am not sure where. But it was so unusual that I recall it. Somebody had talked about wanting to develop some area of wilderness and there were several letters against it and then the man came back with a defense saying that it would provide homes and jobs and schools and so forth. And one letter said the animals had in their first the insects, even the insects had rights that should be respected.

[ Rushdoony ] That is the religion of the {?} of India who wear a mask over their face so they won’t inadvertently breathe in and kill a gnat or some other little flying insect. And they are opposed to the killing of all animal life. They are very strict vegetarians. They take great precautions to kill not even an ant, nothing.

[ Scott ] But do they fight each other?

[ Rushdoony ] I couldn’t tell you about that, but the Hindus who are vegetarians they don’t hesitate to kill each other.

[ Scott ] That is right. That is the strange set of values, isn’t it?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, yes.

[ Scott ] Because, you recall when between four and six million people were slaughtered by the division... at the division of India into Pakistan with knives....

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Not with guns.

[ Murray ] We are denying ourselves the self preservation and guaranteeing it to other species.

[ Scott ] I wonder if that applies to germs. Should we use medicines?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I have heard there are people who are against the killing of germs. But they are people who believe that most of mankind should disappear so that the purity of nature should return.

[ Scott ] Well, they should lead the way.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh. They are going to remain as the caretakers and the rest of us should die. Now earth first has welcomed AIDS, because they have said that 90 percent, nine out of 10 people should die.

[ Scott ] This whole question of the value of life, value of a human being came up, as I recall it, about 20 years or so ago when they first began to introduce the dialysis machines and things of that sort and, of course, they had a number of people backed up who needed to use the machine to live so the physicians began to try to figure out whose life should take precedence and I believe they had a cut off age of 60. I am not sure about the age. Anyone... you and I, Rush, would be out of the running. We are... we have finished. We have already shot our bolt and so forth.

[ Rushdoony ] Speak for yourself, Otto.

[ Scott ] I am speaking now for the doctors. And then they had, I think, educational qualifications, occupations, how useful they were to society and so forth. Well, writers are not very useful. There is too many of them, you know. So... but ... I haven’t heard much about that recently.’

[ Murray ] Well, you know, that there is the medical ethicists are grappling with what they consider to be now an overwhelming dilemma with organ transplants. There has grown now to be 25,000 people in this country waiting for organ transplants. So they are in a process of putting together computerized profiles which will determine people’s quality of life. We are going to have computers telling is whether or not we are going to live or die, because the... the people in the medical profession, they want to unload themselves of this responsibility.

[ Scott ] So how... are they doing a transfer all these qualities to a computer and then feed the computer the values?

[ Murray ] Yes, how much longer you... what is... what is the... would be the rest of your normal life expectancy and all of the various other factors that consider important as far as quality of life. And you either fit the profile or you don’t. If you don’t, you don’t get the organ transplant and the computer, in effect, tells you, you have to die.

[ Rushdoony ] There are some who are saying that method should be applied as euthanasia. In other words...

[ Scott ] Automatic. When a certain number of factors...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...like changing steel pipe it used to be evaluated once.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes

[ Murray ] It was becoming inconvenient for the medical ethicists because they have to meet too often now. When you get 25,000 people to worry about they would be in meetings all the time trying to decide who is going to go and who is going to stay. So they have to make it more efficiently by using... utilizing computer profiling.

[ Rushdoony ] I would like to go back to something with regard to the so called public lands, the federal lands. There was a very interesting book written, oh, I think about.... well, 1982. Dan Fulton was the author, Failure on the Planes: A Rancher’s View of the Public Lands Problem. Dan Fulton is a Montana rancher. And he describes what is happening progressively. He also calls attention to the fact that federal reports indicate the serious mismanagement of federal lands.

[ Scott ] Not surprised.

[ Rushdoony ] So that we are told that the federal government should have these lands to protect them, but these are the areas that are mismanaged, not the privately owned areas. Moreover, we are given a myth, for example, as to Buffalo grass, how deep it was and it was just a few inches high. And the author, Dan Fulton, says that... well, he cites, for example, Roosevelt’s campaign when he ran for the presidency first, a promise of lower taxes and less bureaucracy. And he said, “That promise is about as good as any promise made by any president he had known from Woodrow Wilson through Roosevelt to the present.”

So the idea that property will be in a better condition once it is placed in federal hands is a myth. For example, right here we have a problem because of the draught and the country of all above us just a few miles. And the bark beetle, because of the draught has killed a vast number of trees. Those trees, if cut down immediately are excellent for timber. But if they are not cut down and milled within a year the bark beetle will destroy their validity for construction and they will only be good as firewood. And one would think that all those trees would be cut down very quickly and sold because it would be profitable to sell them. But the red tape is such that they cannot get all of them cut and moved out within a year. And, as a result, the wood is destroyed by the bark beetle. And they manage to lose money on everything. They are disconnected with the forest, whether it is green cut or dead cut they lose money.

[ Scott ] Well, the rationale will vary for public lands. The environmentalists don’t wan to spill in the sub arctic. Now I talked to a geologist some years ago who felt that just below the poles in the Alaska area there is a belt that goes around the earth and he felt that that is... there is enough oil there underneath the permafrost to take care of the world of several hundred years. By that time we may have something else or whatever. But they environmentalists act as though oil is something that is manufactured in the board room of Exxon. They seem to think it is a strange, foreign substance. I mean, they don’t seem to think that it is part of the earth. It is part of the natural resources. And they argue that we shouldn’t drill. We should pay the Arabs for their oil instead and Nigeria’s and what not.

But I have listened to them and I have watched them long enough to realize that these are simply rationales. What they are really talking about is the power to stop you from doing something. If the person is not creative, if they are not able to do things on their own, produce things or whatever, then their creativity takes a perverse twist and it consists of stopping others. I have known men whose entire career is killing other people’s ideas inside the company.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Bringing up some objection immediately when anything is proposed. They think of an objection to it.

[ Murray ] I bet he was a lawyer.

[ Scott ] Well, they... they come in all forms.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Antarctica is a continent under the ice. It is probably one of the riches areas of the world in natural resources. The Soviet Union has been at work there in hush, hush ways. We absolutely will not criticize. And what we have been in process of doing by negotiation is to internationalize Antarctica and to bar any exploration there.

[ Scott ] It is going to be great white park.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But we are not going to interfere with the Soviet Union in what it may do, nor are we going to trespass over areas which they increasingly are saying are off limits to the rest of us. So it is a very, very weird situation.

[ Scott ] We have been afraid of the Soviets ever since 1945. Deathly afraid.’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The whole United States has been in a funk about the Soviets and I don’t know why, because they are not even big men. Most of them are short. They are not 10 feet tall. Of course, even now we are unilaterally disarming in the expectation that if we strip ourselves they will do the same.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think it is an encouraging fact that there is someone on our mailing list who is setting up a foundation for the privatization of federal lands in the Washington, DC area.’

[ Scott ] Well, has anyone ever taken these ... the courts will not accept these issues if you go to the courts with them, you know. The court has surrendered long time ago on all these sensitive matters.

Congress in recent years has dumped certain problems onto the courts for the courts to legislate, because congressmen don’t want to take a chance and the justices are sitting there for life.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the federal government has been controlling the states and expanding its power within the states because of its vast taxing program and handing money to the states. But its ability to do that is ending. And therefore I think more states will follow the pattern of Wyoming and Alaska and declare that they are weary of federal controls and federal ownership.

[ Scott ] With the money that we have spent making friends, end quote, around the world, we are just about equal to our deficit, we could have moved everybody out of the inner cities and into the countryside in villages a log time ago. If you fly on a plane across the United States you see... you go for hours over empty land. We have an immense continent and here these people are sequestering land that ... totally unnecessarily.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, as you pointed out, most of the population of the United States is within 50 miles of...

[ Scott ] Of the sea coast.

[ Rushdoony ] ... of... of the sea coast. Yes.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And they drain the inland areas of their water. So if they were pushed into desalinization, the inland areas would blossom.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And be able to hold vast populations. The tell us desalinization, which some island countries exclusively, is too costly. But my niece’s husband helped a friend in northern California living in one community where they were going to have water rationing this past year put in a desalinization plant for 10,000 dollars. He had a sizeable garden, a family orchard and shrubs, landscaped area. And he is paying for fresh water from his desalinization plant about the same that the city would have charged him had he gone on in on their rationing plan whereby he would have been limited to a few gallons a day. He broke the law in doing that. He openly defied them by advertising it in the paper and they have chosen not to touch him.

So he has demonstrated it is not the hyper expensive thing that they claim it is. It will be if a state or federal agency controls desalinization. But let somebody go into it privately and sell water to people and it will be a different story in a hurry.

[ Murray ] And they don’t want to... public agencies don’t want any competition.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Murray ] Down in the Bay area, for instance, if you drill a well on private property you have to have it plumbed completely separate from the city water system and you have to hang signs on it that it is non potable and it can only be used for garden use and so forth, because we went through that during the draught in 70... in the 70s down in Marin County. So they keep a very strict control on water resources. In fact, for a time when Governor Moonbeam was in the saddle in Sacramento he was talking about putting private wells under state control.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] All water.

[ Rushdoony ] I recall that vividly. And God preserved us from that by sending us....

[ Scott ] A flood.

[ Rushdoony ] ... a flood.

[ Scott ] And it needed a flood to get the fellows that mentioned it.

[ Rushdoony ] And to me the amusing thing was there were floods, there were land slides that closed highway 99 and five going over from Bakersfield on the ridge route to Los Angeles. And it was only reluctantly a few months after these things occurred that they finally agreed to dissolve the state commission that had been created to control all private wells.

[ Murray ] Well, wasn’t there a kind of a cynical selling job done by the federal government? I can remember hearing terms like preserving the wilderness for posterity for your children, your children’s children and that it was sold on the idea that this would be a recreational resource.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] For the people. And then suddenly it is reverted to being a repository or sanctuary for the federal government.

[ Rushdoony ] And if they are now proposing to bar people entirely from some of the new wilderness areas. And as Fulton points out in Failure on the Planes, the federal agencies which have oversight have had their examiners say that these public lands are abused by the federal government so that the care is stupid. We saw that in the Yellowstone fire where federal authorities felt the fire was a natural thing so let it burn. There are so many conflicting theories within in the forest service alone as to how land should be managed that each of them are creating havoc with the application of their theories.

[ Scott ] It is coming close to church fights.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and it is more bitter.

[ Scott ] Because they ... they are suffused with some sort of spurious virtue.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They really feel that there ... there is a religious element in this.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which is very strange.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you put your finger on a very important point. It was recently stated by advocates of the homosexual community that homophobia, the view of disdain by straights was a violation of the religious liberty of homosexuals. And on First Amendment grounds we have no right to speak out against homosexuality.

[ Scott ] Can we throw up?

[ Rushdoony ] Not in a public place, Otto.

[ Scott ] Well, I will give them that they are nauseating, you know. They are nauseous people.

[ Murray ] You can always hold that open as an option.

[ Scott ] Yes. But, I mean, who is going to mandate this admiration? What government is stupid enough to go down this line? Ours, of course. But what is waiting for us just around the road?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you have the same insanity all over the world. They are protected everywhere.

Well, our time is very nearly up. Would ... do you have a last comment or two to make about the privatization of federally held lands?

[ Murray ] Well, I hope it happens or it begins to happen in my life time, but it appears as though the federal government wants to lock up natural resources because I can’t see any other.... there is no other rational reason for it. We have discussed the irrational reasons, but I tend to think that that is some kind of a smoke screen. It is a Trojan horse. And I think that the real reason behind this is to lock up the natural resources so that they cannot be utilized by private industry nor private business interests.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto?

[ Scott ] Well which resulted in the destruction of the mining industry.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It has ended the creation of new pipelines and the creation of new refineries. I this severely... it has reduced our native petroleum industry which was our largest single industry is now in partnership with the Arabs in order to survive.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We are paying a very heavy economic price for Environmentalism and it has practically everything to do with the recession that is now moving into a depression.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and we are in treaty with Canada and with Mexico with the expectation of transferring industry to those two countries and turning the United States into some kind of park. However, I think the growing world wide economic collapse and the fact that the federal government is running out of money will work in our favor. And the forces for privatization will be furthered by the bankruptcy of the federal government. I think we are not too many years behind the Soviet Union where they are now running the printing presses 24 hours a day printing new money and the only time they stop is when they run out of paper. So they are beginning to pursue the course of Germany in 1923 and are begging us to bail them out of it, which, if we do, will plunge us into the same serious course. But I think the federal government is committing suicide.

[ Scott ] We are just as bankrupt as they are.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.