| | Thank you for this insightful portrayal of the notion of public "ownership".
In the American West, when grain prices fell precipitously at the end of WWI, the homesteaders packed their belongings and abandoned their homesteads in droves, their departures hastened by drought. Cattle ranchers saw opportunity where uneconomic homesteading had failed and began expanding their herds, developing water sources, and fencing the open rangeland that had been always previously grazed in common under the rules of cattlemen's associations. By fencing the rangeland, de facto ownership passed from the associations to individuals. I have read that the state legislatures were beginning to pass resolutions and laws recognizing the informal property rights of the cattlemen.
Into this developing crises of private ownership galloped the Department of the Interior with its Taylor Grazing Act. Federal agents approached cattle ranchers with a carrot and a stick. The carrot was that if they cooperated and supported the act, they could use the rangeland for grazing as they were already doing, and "in perpetuity", for grazing fees no higher than property taxes. The stick was if they declined to cooperate by, for example, refusing to tear out their fences, they faced fines and possibly worse.
Of course, "in perpetuity" turned out to last about one generation: by the mid Seventies, the crusade was in motion to remove the cattle and sheep belonging to so-called "welfare ranchers" from the "public lands". Today, green fashionatas campaign for "the Big Open"--a soviet-scale utopia that features the reintroduction of buffalo and wolves into the supposedly "windswept and dying" West.
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