Comments about ‘Letter: Public lands are already ours, use money for education’

Sorry, but you are wrong on every count. There is no plan to sell of public lands. The cost of maintenance can be recouped from grazing rights alone, everything else is gravy. The benefits are many.

Good letter, deceptive headline.

An excellent letter!

What is ironic about the "take back our lands" people's is that they are the same ones who have their hands out for more money from the federal government for just about everything else. Hypocrites.

@KDave, if you're right, then what's the value to Utah of taking title to the lands? If they're not going to be sold off, then where will all the vaunted tax revenue come from? From oil-gas leases that are already being sold? From severance taxes that don't exist? Do you honestly believe grazing fees will make up for the lost Federal outlay on BLM? You haven't done the math, have you?

You letter is spot on. All this take the land back talk is code for "give it to developers so we can collect fees" (we don't like the word tax). Then they promise the money will go to our education fund but in fact it will go to the privitization of our education system which costs much more than public education and that is assuming it goes to education. It is more likely to end up in the coffers of the Capital so they can continue to play their little political games.

Governor Herbert and the boys on the hill are determined to assert their self-righteous dominion far beyond their authority. The concept of “states’ rights” is a misnomer invoked by Ronald Reagan in reference to racial desegregation, and yet, like petulant children, our hypocritical legislature pounds its pudgy fists and stomps its little feet in collective opposition to federal ownership of public lands, while simultaneously grabbing every federal dollar that is dangled in front of them. These include highway funds, education funds, and the biggest goodie bag of all, federal disaster funds.

States are subservient to the federal government in much the same manner that children are subservient to their parents. If we're not going to obey the grownups, then we need the maturity to realize that we don't deserve our allowance.

Can you imagine what the lands of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument might look like today if President Clinton hadn’t invoked the Antiquities Act? As a Utahn who values our public lands far beyond their potential for short-term, destructive energy extraction, I thank God that the “Feds” are in charge.

Great letter. Thank you.

It's nice to see other perspectives brought up related to public lands. Whichever side you're on, it's obviously not a simple issue.

Let us never forget that over half of our state legislators are involved in real estate development in some form or another. Taking public lands from the public is in their best interest.

@ Winglish: Sad but true.

Public property. It's terribly impractical, but it makes for endless editorials and political controversy for news outlets.

How do I get my fair say/share of "public" property? What if I'm a coal miner? I can't ever get what I want because it's so difficult to get permission from the rest of the "public" property owners. What if I'm deathly afraid of rattlesnakes? I can't get my fair share of extermination of rattlesnakes because a lot of the "public" property owners don't want to hurt nature.

Public property is a farce. It's not that we all own it it's that no one owns it. All so-called public lands should be made available for homesteading immediately. Some homesteaders will succeed, others will fail. But that is what being free is all about. To make the best run at making a life for yourself as possible.

Then grazing, mining, fireworks, ATVs, protesters, construction, and every other controversy imaginable will be gobbled up in freedom including the right to use one's own property as one sees fit.

Oh, and then the government can't use land as a taxation bludgeon.

Pippin, Your descriptions of freedom are naive at best and dangerously inline with Utah's childish legislature.

Owning land doesn't give you half of the rights you list above, and free for all homesteading isn't in the best interests of anyone for about a hundred years now.

You don't want to use the land, you want to use it up, big difference.

Timothy Egan Summed it up in his NY Times Op-Ed, "The Tree's Are All Right" I encourage all to read the full text.

The rest of us need our public land. The West is defined by new, fast-growing cities surrounded by the mountains, mesas, forests, sandstone spires and various shared settings. There is no other place in the world where urban and wild coexist over such a huge area. If you are poor, you can feel rich just minutes from the city, in your estate that is a national forest. If you ski in the high Sierra, or raft a runaway river in Utah, you are most likely doing it on land whose only deed of title is held by all citizens.

@Happy Valley Heretic:

My "distinctions" of freedom are actually quite simple. I have the right to act because I'm free; I have liberty. I choose to act to fulfill my life as I pursue happiness. I do not expect anyone to provide me with property or happiness and I do not wish to be forced to provide these things for others.

In the context of property: if there is a resource that is unharnessed and I wish to harness it, I do not wish for others to stop me in using my life and time to make use of it if I believe that in so doing I will advance my own happiness (obviously insofar as I don't steal from or hurt someone in the process). A society who would prevent me from trying to do so because society owns it is a society of compulsion, not freedom.

That same society doesn't hesitate to compel me to pay taxes to support others or to dictate which things I ought to buy for my own "good".

The principle in both instances is the same: the good of society over the individual, and that's the opposite of freedom.

The Utah legislature, like the song says, wants to "pave paradise to put up a parking lot?"

I'm glad to hear another voice in the debate on wilderness and public lands. Thanks to you and the Deseret News for publishing it.