Easy Chair Series

Federal Tyranny

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 49-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC351

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 351.

Tonight Douglas Murray, Andrew Sandlin, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss, first of all, federal tyranny.

Now this is a very important subject here in the West at the moment because of the Sagebrush Rebellion. It was sparked by the ranchers in Nye County Nevada and has spread throughout the West. Tonight’s television news said that the federal government was going to move against the Nye County board of supervisors. The Nye County board of supervisors declared the county owned all the public lands within the county.

Now the background to this is that the US Constitution specifically states that the federal government can own no land within any of the states except post offices and military bases. This means that whenever any territory became a state, the state took over the ownership of all the public lands. Very, very early the Supreme Court quietly overturned that provision of the Constitution so that the drift to centralism has been one of long standing.

The whole of the Sagebrush Rebellion has been discussed in various periodicals. National Review in its October ninth, 1995 number had an article on law and disorder. The tension in Nye County is such that uniformed agents of the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have been refused services in stores and restaurants in Nye County. It is a large county geographically but it does not have much population. Tonopah, which is a very small city or maybe what somewhat oversize town has a good deal, maybe half or more of the population.

Now this crisis is one that has been building up for a long, long time. Back under Franklin Delano Roosevelt the sheep men began to be crowded out of their normal ranges. Let me say that the mountain and forest areas need grazing and the cattle are the best in grazing them, because otherwise the grass mats down and becomes a thick cushion of dry vegetation which is highly inflammable.

Now more than a few, in fact, most of the forest fires in recent years have been very, very difficult to control because of that highly inflammable mass of dry grass. The cattle have for generations since the West began, grazed in the national forests. They have eaten up the grass. They have destroyed the greasewood type brush and made it possible for the young trees to grow better. They don’t bother them because those trees taste like turpentine to them.

Now with these controls many ranchers will be put out of business. Meat production in this country will be dramatically curtailed and prices of beef, in particular, will rise because historically a ranch has carried with it grazing rights to certain areas of the national forest. So we have a very, very real crisis here. The federal government is not budging an inch. It is treating the entire constitutional aspect as though it were nothing.

The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, of course, is acting as though the ranchers are out to destroy the West. Tonight on television some of these officials were speaking about over grazing and how it was going to do fearful damage.

Well, the rancher is in the business of producing meat. And if there is not enough grazing his cattle are not going to thrive in the national forests. So it is not a matter of over grazing. It is a simply a matter of land management and the rancher puts his cattle on a national forest when he has used up the available grazing on his acreage. He cannot keep them there when there is nothing for them to feed on or when they are so overgrazing the land that it is difficult for them to forage.

There are portions of the West that are desert or semi desert areas where on an average you put one cow per 100 acres. This is not true of the contested areas. So we have a crisis. There are two aspects to it. One: Are the claims of the federal authorities about overgrazing true? The other: What does the Constitution say? And it is very clear that such lands do not belong to the federal government.

Well, with that, Douglas, you are very, very well versed in this area. Would you take over?

[Murray] Well, I read an account that was published in the International Mining Journal of August, 1994 which is an eye witness account written by a Donald Boland about the confrontation between the Nye County commissioner Richard Carver and the U S Forest Service district ranger for the Tonopah District and also the ... there is another U S Forest Service individual there by the name of Young. And they played out a little one act play over this road that went between two mining properties that has been used in an open and notorious use by the public for decades fell into disuse for a while and when a new mining company came in they wanted to open it back up again. And initially the Forest Service agreed that the road had to be realigned and repaired and the district ranger agreed to this and the county commissioners said that the county should apply of a permit.

Well, the Nye County commissioners have claimed that all roads in the county are county roads and they don’t feel that they should have to get a permit from a federal entity to work on a county road. So they told the Forest Service that they were going to go out and repair the road without the permit.

So this became a celebrated event. Two hundred people showed up from the surrounding area, in fact, from surrounding states for this little standoff and this one fellow from the Forest Service stood in front of the bulldozer with a little sign that said, “Stop unauthorized disturbance, signed Dave Young, U S Forest Service.”

Now it wasn’t stop in the name of the law. No law was cited. No section of federal statute was cited, because there was apparently nothing to cover the situation. They felt that their mere presence was enough to stop this reopening of this road. And they showed up wearing guns. And they were asked by the county commissioner to remove their side arms because nobody else there was carrying guns or anything else that would be of a threat to anyone. They felt that the government personnel wearing firearms was a provocative act.

But I remember 20 to 25 years ago when all of this came into being. I remember the chief ranger for Yosemite National Park quit his job. Now he is a man with a master’s degree in ... in forestry and had been Yosemite’s chief ranger for many, many years, well liked and had done a very good job for the park, but he said he absolutely refused to wear a side arm in the performance of his job of growing trees. He felt it was unnecessary.

But this was something that was quietly instituted in all of these public agencies. All federal agencies all of the sudden over night were authorized by Congress at that time to create paramilitary organizations within their ranks to go out and enforce this grab of public lands. The Bureau of Land Management did it in this area in the foothills of California. There was one celebrated instance that was only published in the local paper where an 83 year old woman was thrown off of a mining claim that she and her husband had worked virtually all of their lives. The... this... the Bureau of Land Management goon squad—I mean, that is the only way you can describe it—went in and forcibly removed her from this cabin. She had nowhere else to go. She had no relatives, no living relatives. And they held her, forcibly held her outside the building while they destroyed her cabin. And then they left her there. They wouldn’t even give her a ride into town. And it was 23 miles to the nearest settlement and they wouldn’t even give her a ride. Some other people had to take her into town to try to... to get her put up or the night.

And these kinds of ... of outrages were perpetrated numerous times, but got no coverage in the national press. They were covered well in the local press, but the national press refused to cover them. they did not see that this was a widespread pattern of abuse that was going on. They ... they refused to recognize it as such, but people who... in the mining industry and forestry and other national resource areas were aware of these federal para military organizations going out and throwing people physically throwing people off of public land that they had been using for considerable length of time, had the mining claims filed. They were up to date. They were legally entitled to be on that property to ... to use it for mining purposes or exploration purposes. And yet they were forcibly removed. The federal government was intent on scaring people the public land.

And there is other stories where mining machinery worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was intentionally destroyed by BLM personnel where they would drive a guy’s bull dozer into a mine shaft and wreck it, you know, put it on... put it in gear and then jump off of it and let the 250,000 dollar bull dozer go down a mine shaft and destroy it. I mean these were illegal acts that were conducted in the name of the people of the United States. However, the people of the United States were unaware that they were going on, didn’t authorize them and these cowboy type antics were apparently allowed and ignored by their superiors.

In any case, the road was opened in this Nye County area and now it is... at the time they did note the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service didn’t know what to do about it, but now they have got Janet Reno on their side. Why if you can destroy the lives of 93 women and children, why, taking the carver... taking the Nye County commissioners to task shouldn’t be a difficult job for her at all.

This is ... this is the down side of it. However, since then some progress has been made. There has been a major victory for public rights of way in Alaska. There was a case involved whether or not a private land owner in... near Fairbanks, Alaska, could use a right of way to cross a military base when the right of way was established prior to creation of the base. And apparently the ninth circuit court has ruled that it ... that the historic access routes are guaranteed to those people that have been using them in order to get to their mining claims, to their... to their timber or whatever activity they were involved in. So simply because the government says that they are going to establish a military base does not rule out the ... the access across that base by ... by people who have to get access to this property on the other side. And this is pretty much in common law been the case. You supposedly can’t sell a piece of land locked property. It is illegal for in individual citizen to sell a piece of land locked property. He would have to ... you have to give a right of way onto that property in order to... to sell it.

However, the government has exempted themselves from this. If you have a piece of property, a mining claim or even a patented mining claim that you don’t have the... that there is no road into it, the government will not give you access. So they are requiring something of individuals that they exempt themselves from. This kind of double standard has become the rule in dealing with public property and ... and with people involved in resource development.

The other thing is that Congress, the new Congress in about mid 1994 a couple of representatives, one Democrat and one Republican, started support of legislation to protect the rights of public property owners and the bill was known as the Private Property Owners Bill of Rights and just basically it seeks to establish statutorially the right that requires notice and written consent for entry onto private property by any government entity. Also review and challenge of information gained from access to private property, also the right to know when property is affected by the acts. You know, a lot of people go out and buy a piece of property in good faith and they don’t know whether they are going to be able to use it for what they want to use it for. You know, like the farms who bought the property and were trying to get rid of the mosquitoes and wound up in jail. Even after they had gotten all of the permits and so forth to put in ponds and so forth and they ... the father and the son both wound up in jail, in prison.

Speeding hearings for appeals and compensations for taking some private property. Now there is compensation for taking some private property is something that... that keeps coming back like a song. I mean, the Supreme Court ruled on this in 1968 that any governmental entity that takes property for public use has to pay you for it at a fair market value. But yet the government keeps forgetting that these laws are passed in its dealings through regulatory agencies and the regulatory agencies themselves are governed by people who are appointees. They are not elected officials. Bruce Babbitt is not an elected official. He is the Secretary of the Interior. He is a cabinet secretary and he isn’t elected by anybody. And yet he is issuing rulings regarding the use or non use of public lands and access to private property without benefit of the courts or benefit of any... anything other than ruling by decree.

So, you know, when cabinet level people are ruling by decree, things are out of control. But the people were stunned by this because, you know, generations of people had gotten used to being able to raise cattle on national forest lands and mining exploration companies have, you know, going through the proper chanels, getting the permits and so forth have been used to for years, these were heretofore formalities. Simply the government wanted to know who was doing what on public and which was perfectly reasonable.

But when they use these procedures to thwart the use of public lands, then it is a different ball game. And that is what we have these agencies doing.

But the... the people at the grass roots are beginning to organize. They are getting smarter. I know of one group, the Gold Country Miners in ... up on the American River. They have gone up against the California Fish and Game and they have... they had one Fish and Game guy up there who was writing rules arbitrarily and they threatened to sue him for selective enforcement because he would come along with one year with one set of rules and then the next year he would rewrite the rules. And the next year wanted to rewrite the rules again, before the rules had a chance to work without benefit of any scientific justification or any documentation. Here again, ruling by decree.

Here is a guy who is making probably 35,000 dollars a year who is taking unto himself the power of a Supreme Court judge. You know, a supreme tribunal. He is usurping the... the powers of the legislative branch clearly in violation of the state Constitution and in violation of the federal Constitution.

But you have got generations of people who are uneducated. They don’t know what is in the Constitution and they could care less.

[Voice] That is right.

[Murray] Their bosses don’t care. They have a job to do. They are being told what is the political marching order of the day and they simply ignore the Constitution. And it is up to the people to remind these people what is in the Constitution and to firmly, but non violently either through the use of the courts, through suing them personally... now when they engage in selective enforcement, such as this fish and game, California Fish and Game individual did, he is no longer protected by the... the cloak of legal representation that is afforded by the state attorney general’s office. He is on his own. He has broken the law. When any government official violates their own rules, such as this individual did, because he didn’t go out to public hearings. He simply arbitrarily over night says as of a certain date the rules are going to be changed. And it was found out that he was doing the bidding of a radical environmentalist group called Friends of the River. And they want exclusive use of the rivers for rafters and kayakers. And the justification that the State of California took over the use of all waterways in California was that they would be multi use. And it is written into the state Constitution. They have to be multi use. That means that if you have a river running through your property the government, the state government controls the use of it. However, the have to guarantee that it is open to all for fishing or hiking or boating or recreational mining, all kinds of uses, because once they attempt to exclude one activity, then they have to exclude all of them. And that is the basis that the California Fish and Game people were taken to task on.

And the deputy attorney general from the state attorney general’s office apologized profusely when a law suit was threatened against this Fish and Game individual and the letter writing campaign ensued and that individual no longer has that job. He has been transferred to some distant duty in Barstow and he is no longer sitting in the seat of power in Sacramento.

So... and this was done by 375 people who simply made a concerted effort to point out to government officials above him that he was violating the law and they were subject to... personally subject to civil suits. So people are going to have to do this on a more widespread basis. They are, you know, people have been just reeling from the ... the stridency of these regulatory agencies who have been boosted by the media, have been actually sanctified by the media as doing the good work on behalf of the people. Well, it turns out that the people who produce the wealth in this country, if they can’t get to the resources, they can’t produce the wealth and if you can’t produce the wealth you can’t pay taxes and if you can’t pay taxes, the whole system goes down the drain. So they are kind of shooting themselves in the foot. But that doesn't seem to slow them up any.

[Voice] No, that is ... they are not smart enough to see that yet, see?

[Murray] Well, you have got a bunch of college...

[multiple voices]

[Murray] You have got a bunch of college kids who have no historical perspective whatsoever. They don’t know any history. They think that history is irrelevant, their parents are irrelevant. Their parents are irrelevant. History is irrelevant, that it has no... it has no... it has nothing to teach them. And they are arrogant to a fault that they are going to reinvent everything and that they are going to prevail no matter that there has been several thousand years of failures of governments trying to do this. The simple fact exists that no government has ever outlasted the people. But the people have to rise up in a concerted action, not in violence, but in a concerted intelligent action. They first have to inform themselves. They have to educate themselves. They have to find out what legal aveneues are available to them and then they have to exercise them vigorously. Because it... it... from what I have seen so far—and this is just within the past couple of years—these grass roots organizations have risen up and they have accomplished a great deal. It is amazing how quickly the genie goes back into the bottle when they are confronted by these people. In fact, some of them are stunned. They are literally stunned.

I was given an account of... a first hand account of ... of the meeting where this fish and game individual was confronted and told that he was liable to civil suit for selective enforcement and he was stunned. His jaw dropped open and his head went down in his arms and he was ... he was just amazed that there was any kind of... going to be any... any countervailing force. There...they have been so used to getting what they want for so long that they think that it is going to go on forever.

So people are going to have to understand. They are going to have to get involved in the process even if it is simply to the extent of writing letters and thoughtfully and expressing their views.

[Voice] I think a good indication of the attitude of the federal government recently when the government shut down for a week over the budget debate in the last federal budget and here in Yosemite National Park and Grand Canyon National Park, Yellowstone National parks, the federal government chose to shut down the park. They could have just as easily left the gates open and let people drive in and look around.

[Voice] That is right.

[Voice] ...and close the concession stands where the employees were, but they chose to shut it down.

[Voice] That was their preference.

[Murray] Yeah, the... the problem with that is that it would show unnecessary their presence really is and has always been.

[Rushdoony] There was an interesting cartoon recently when the federal government for a few days shut down some of its operation and a cartoonist who is, I don’t think, a conservative had a cartoon about two men discussing the matter and said, “If they are going to shut down unessential services, why don’t they begin with the White House?”

Well, one of the problems today is that we don’t shut down legislative bodies enough, both on the state and the federal level. And as long as they are in session the bureaucracy is there with its measures it wants passed, the money it wants and the controls over us increase. And it leads to the arrogance of these bureaucrats. They act as though the country is about to go to rack and ruin.

Well, 120 years or so ago there were people talking about the destruction of American forests and public lands. In fact, since that hue and cry began, the forests have increased. In the 20s when I was in grade school the environmentalists were active then and, as I have mentioned on other occasions, they talked about the depletion of natural resources so that oil was running out and coal and by the time we eight and ninth graders got out of school we would all be sitting in the dark, because of the loss of energy.

What these people don't realize is that the earth is a vast bundle of natural resources. When I went to school they couldn’t go very far down in the ground. In fact, the mine that used to exist on our home property went down about 100 feet only, a gold mine. Now they can go down a few mile. It is because as we increase our technology, we are able to reach more and more natural resources in the ground.

By the same token, as our population has grown, we have had an appreciation of the necessity of resources so that the big lumber companies very early began to protect their future by reforestation. It has been the small lumber operator who goes in and slashes and carts off everything and then goes out of business. But the big lumber companies long before environmentalism was heard of, were active in protecting their future.

Well, the same is true of ranchers who use public lands. They have been using them for generations. If they had at any time in the past destroyed those lands and the available grasses, they would have been out of business. It is ridiculous to act as though these people are destroyers pure and simple. That is not the case.

[Voice] Well, I was thinking about the fact of this idea of federal tyranny is not something new. I had occasion this past week to do a little reading and, oh, Plato and Aristotle and Montaigne and Marx and Rousseau. They were all, of course, statists to the core. And I was thinking when we were formulating this topic about the first significant warning of federal tyranny being in 1 Samuel chapter eight where Israel, of course, wanted a king like the nations about them and God led Samuel to warn them about the specific federal tyranny and so this is not something that is new. It is something that has been going on for quite a while.

I want to mention, too, something that Rush deals with in, I believe it is Politics of Guilt and Pity and that is this... a lot of this stuff assumes the idea of eminent domain.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] That essentially the state owns everything and at best leases certain properties to individuals who can take what they want and will. He points out there that this includes the idea, entails the idea of sovereignty. And it is a religious idea. So what we are talking about here, what Douglas has just so eloquently described in the last half hour is really a rival religion.

[Voice] Yes.

[Voice] These people are dedicated to a different faith and they are just as zealous in their faith as the most zealous Christian is.

[Murray] Well, the thing that is... has not been covered by the press or the great body of the American people are totally unaware of, particularly in the eastern part of the United States they have no concept of the human cost that this is taking on people there in the western states.

[Voice] {?} it was mentioned we were talking in the break about this up in the {?} area we... tell us about that situation.

[Murray] When I went up there last year and there is a little town called Happy Camp on the ... not eh Claimeth River about 35 miles west of the main artery, main north and south artery I-5 just south of the Oregon California border. And the ... the only industry in that town was the mill. Now there had been mining activity around the hills there previously, but most of that is gone. There was a small amount of small scale dredging in the river, but that has pretty much dried up or become recreational in nature and not commercial.

So the only employer in that ... that town that has been there for probably 100 years was this mill. And when Bruce Babitt, Secretary Babbitt decided that they were going to stop logging cold turkey 800 families were forced to move from their homes in that town and it... it decimated the population. It closed churches. It tore families apart. It caused enormous dislocation in people’s lives, enormous loss to them, because their homes... with so many people moving out how much can you sell a house for in that kind of a market?

[Voice] Yeah.

[Murray] You can’t get anything for it. It is like Texas when the oil patch dried. You know, was shut down, down there. You can’t get anything for the house and people just have to move away and ... and lose their equity. So people that have worked and saved and sacrificed for years to try to build a home for their families lost it all in the wink of an eye.

And the press totally ignored this. The government didn’t provide any compensation and the... the people in the environmental movement couldn’t care less.

[Voice] Yeah.

[Murray] I mean, you talk about cold blooded attitude toward other human beings. These people were the most ruthless cold blooded individuals that I have seen. They have no concept of the human cost and they just don’t care.

[Voice] Yeah.

[Murray] In that town I talked to some of the people in the local law enforcement down there and they said that they were appalled by the amount and... and intensity of the spousal abuse and the child abuse and the drunkenness and all of the problems arose out of the frustration, the sheer frustration of men who were trained to do one thing and that was work in this mill and suddenly their livihood was taken from them over night and the mill was virtually shut down now and that town is decimated. You can roll a bowling ball down the main street and not hit anybody at high noon. And it is... that same story is repeated town after town after town after town through the sierras in California and the logging industry is totally shut down in Oregon.

[Voice] Well, these social... Socialist elitists are hypocrites, because they claim to be concerned about people and that is just not true. They are... they want to spin political Utopias out of their own mind. And they don’t care who they hurt. I mean all they care is there is this rational plan they have in their mind and everybody has to fit in that rational plan and if they don’t and it is in the Soviet Union throw them in the gulag and if it is in America, do just what you are describing. The important thing is not people. The important thing is their rationalism.

[Murray] Well, we... we have a new gulag in the United States. It is called the minimum wage jobs. And, you know, it has been variously called by Ross Perot hamburger flippers and so forth, but that is the new American gulag.

[Voice] Dead end jobs they are called.

[Murray] Yes. Dead end jobs, minimum wage, not enough to keep you alive and ... but too much to go on welfare and it is ... I expect to see a book with that title, The New American Gulag because you have got a rising number of people, even university graduates who are forced to take temporary work through these temporary employment. They can’t get full time employment because the companies can’t afford to pay them or won’t pay the... the medical coverage and with the huge influx of illegal immigrants and immigrants into this country, many of them who have educations that they got by accident that are better than the kids in this country got on purpose, are able to do the jobs better.

I went up to Seattle in July of this year and went to Microsoft and {?} and some of the electronics companies up there and I will bet you at least 40 percent of their staff are... are Asians because they are smart and they are aggressive. They are well based in primary education and they study all the time. They don’t stop just because they quit school. They re studying all the time. They take advantage of any educational opportunity that comes along here if they are in a company, within the company or at night school. And Americans have become too lazy to do that. And people are going to have to understand that, you know, they are going to be consigned to the American gulag which is the hamburger flipper jobs for the rest of their lives if they... they don’t, you know, get out from behind the television set and retrain themselves.

[Voice] Well, Americans have never been very good about protecting their jobs in... in this century and we are ... we are losing them. The Environmentalists combined with the ... the Environmentalist bureaucrat coalition is convenient because the Environmentalists want to control the environment and it is a convenient way for government bureaucrats to step and say, “That is a good idea, because we will be the ones doing the actual controlling.” And they control the mountains and so there is no mining. There is no logging. And al to of these industries that... that are basically shutting down are very difficult to ... to resurrect. Right now someone I know who is a logger says he is getting too old to climb trees to top them off and he is having a hard time finding people to do it. No young men want to go into the logging industry. It is a dangerous job. And they see no future in it. So what is the point of... of going into an industry that appears to be dying? There used to be a half a dozen mills on Calabaras County. In 1978, I think, they were still about two or three operating and now there are... there are none. One was a very modern mill that closed down a couple of years ago. But it is just that they couldn’t cut the logs. The government controls the forests and the government decided to put all sorts of road blocks in their way. And they would use one excuse or another. If it wasn’t... before it was spotted owls. They would say, “Well, our budget won’t allow us to conduct the environmental studies to put these stands of timber up for sale.” They use one rationale for another to basically say, “Reduce the amount of logging. Reduce it.” Loggers didn’t have any jobs.

The cost of opening up a mine are astronomical. The companies who then produce the mining equipment are few and far between because there is so little mining. It is difficult to create these industries and resurrect an industry once it is dead.

[Voice] {?}

[Voice] Yeah, I think eventually, though, Americans, there is going to be a backlash. And somebody is going to see to it that it is to their political advantage when people get fed up. But it Is not going to happen that people get up...

[Murray] When will people start? When will people starve? Now I was reading an account in Mining Magazine about ... and I think it was {?} minerals or something. They have spent 30 years trying to open a phosphate mine, 30 years and millions of millions of dollars in regulatory paper shuffling because the government really doesn’t want them to open the mine. So they have put all kinds of roadblocks, additional environmental impact studies ad nauseum in their path. But they have hung in there.

Well, phosphate is fertilizer and that is what you grow food with. And when the Environmentalists get hungry, too, food isn’t. Somebody has to grow it. Somebody has to produce it. When the food runs out, when the money runs out, these people are all going to starve, too. For instance, it takes the average human being in this country is supported at the current standard of living by 10 tons of minerals per year. You know, in metals, in phosphates and fertilizers to grow the food that they eat. All of this stuff. So mining is not an inconsequential activity in this society or any other industrialized society. So people are going to have to do without cars, do without television sets, do without synthetic clothes, in fact, perhaps, do without clothes all together because you can’t grow cotton without mechanized agriculture anymore. All these things are going to be gone. The VCRs, the televisions, the whole nine yards is going to be gone, but they don't see that this is the eventual result of the... of the destruction of mining and the destruction of resource based industries.

[Voice] I believe if it doesn’t come sooner, it is going to come as a backlash when the... our debt economy collapses. People are going to do whatever it takes and they are not going to care if there is a regulation.

[Murray] The United States has already spent all the money that was accumulated during the industrial revolution. It is all gone. You know 200 ... 200 years of ... of ... of the production of wealth has been dissipated. It is gone.

[Voice] I tell my students that a capitalistic economy is supposed to be built on capital and savings and now we are... our entire economy is geared around debt and maniupulation of debt.

[off mic voice]

[Voice] And so that it is a complete economic revolution has taken place from an economy built on savings to an economy built upon debt.

[off mic voice]

[Rushdoony] Well, I referred to something earlier and what you are discussing now is related to it. From one cattleman to another the percentage of cattle they run on federal land varies. But a very large number of the cattlemen of the West depend on federal lands. If you eliminate, as they are doing, step by step, the use of federal lands by cattlemen, then you are going to cut the production of beef. You are going to increase the cost of beef. This could lead to a kind of enforced vegetarianism on all who cannot afford to pay a great deal for meat. We are already seeing the effects of some of these things in the price of meat so that we are counterproductive in our economic policies.

I was observing to someone just yesterday that back in the 20s the luxury meat was chicken. It was very expensive. If you had the money to buy a chicken you made it go as far as you could and one of the most popular dishes of the 20s was chicken a la king. And when Hoover ran for reelection, well, when he ran first for election he saw greater prosperity around the corner and said that it would lead to a chicken in every pot.

Well, when he was saying that he was saying, “You are all going to be very well off. You will be able to afford a chicken,” which at that time not many did.

Well, along came agricultural experts and farmers and in not too many years they made chicken the cheapest meat. And then instead of a chicken in every pot as a luxury item to be dreamed about it was a common place thing. But meanwhile, very subtly lamb has disappeared from the American diet. Now three are two or three reasons for that which I won’t go into. But one of them was federal interference with grazing rights.

Now we are seeing the same thing take place little by little with beef so that beef will be a luxury item before this is over.

This is the direction we are taking and the average American does not realize the high price he has paid and will pay for regulations by the federal government.

[Voice] That is exactly right. When people surrender their self government that is what this is specifcally leading to. They don’t want to govern themselves and so they want to become slaves. That is precisely what has happened.

[Rushdoony] One of our problems, too, is that in my lifetime we have gone from being a rurally oriented, farm oriented country to an urban country. When I was a child most Americans even though they had come to be in the cities were born on a farm or in a small town and then had migrated to the cities for a job. So they still had the perspective of rural life. And I remember that one of the most common poems when I was in school was thanksgiving going home to grandma and grandpa at the farm. There was a very popular poem about that. It was in some of the school books.

Well, that aspect of our life is gone. And because most people are in an urban context, they don’t know the kind of thing you are talking about, Douglas. And because they are ignorant, it is no skin off their nose as far as they are concerned and they are seeing themselves being stripped of their future, of their ability to govern their lives. Step by step it is being done and it is going to mean fearful consequences for everyone unless they wake up and turn this around.

[Voice] The separate mentality, there is an urban mentality.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] ...which is totally different from a rural mentality. Concerning the separate rights they are concerned with self expression and right to free speech. They are not concerned with property rights because, as you said, it is no skin off of them.

I wanted to mention very quickly that one of the chief assaults as far as the federal tyranny is concerned is in the area of education.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] I wanted to throw that in, because the federal government in alliance with state governments have assaulted us and it must be opposed and, of course, we at Chalcedon have been opposing it for 30 years, but we need to recall that and not... not forget that point also.

[Voice] If people who go to state schools all their life have an assumption that it is that the government has to run this, have ... government has to run that or it won’t be well run.

[Voice] They can’t conceive that it could be another way. That is right.

[Voice] And the government... there is nothing that that the government has ever done efficiently.

[Murray] Well, {?} offer an alternative.

[Voice] No.

[Murray] They are not...

[multiple voices]

[Murray] ...told that there are any alternatives.

[Voice] And didn’t de Tocqueville say that was the greatest tyranny of all, the tyranny that leading people to believe that there can’t be any other way? And that is precisely what Mark was describing. I mean...

[Rushdoony] One of the things that has happened wherever the federal government has a forest area for a long time is that it becomes a sterile environment. The trees grow big, tall and shade the ground so that grass doesn’t grow. Dear leave the national forest to go to adjacent private properties and private forests where there will be grazing. And the federal objective seems to be to create more and more sterile areas.

[Murray] Well, the ... the dear around here aren’t stupid. I mean, they travel all the way up from {?} down from the high country at five, six, 7000 feet. They walk all the way down the {?} down to the orchards down here where they can get free apples.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Well, our time is very nearly over. Do you have a final observation, Douglas?

[Murray] Well, cutting to the chase, I truly believe that all of these subterfuges that the Environmentalist movement has used such as the spotted owl and the environmental species act and all of these things of finding a ... a sort of a... a symbol or a poster child, if you will, to benefit their cause that the general public can’t possibly oppose. It is, you know, Smokey the Bear. It is the fuzzy little owl. It is this, that and the other. And these... this is a Trojan horse for gaining total control over the population. And the population has got to wake up and wake up quickly. And get involved in the process of opposing this, because it is the only way it is going to turn around. Otherwise you will wake up with a total tyranny which we are very close to at the... right now. So find a resource based industry. They all have public relations groups that have information effecting their industry, get free pamphlets. Find out what you can do in your community to assist these industries because those industries provide your jobs and they provide the resources that gives you the lifestyle that you have come to be accustomed to. And if you want to live in a cave and cook over an open fire, just continue to ignore what is going on.

[Voice] I think it is important to point out that God commanded us to have dominion over the earth.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] Not to lock it up in one giant nature preserve.

[Voice] That is right.

[Voice] And he didn’t tell us to have dominion over it for the fun of having dominion so we could enjoy having power. We need to have dominion over it because that is what produces our food and everything else for our needs. It is a necessity for our existence and for our well being.

If man doesn't exercise dominion on the earth, the earth will exercise dominion over man and that is precisely what is happening in the case of Environmentalism.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.