Range Wars with the Federal Government

[marshaul]

"Improved land" is the point that I was trying to make. An acre of my land is improved, is the remainder abandoned and forfeit?

Perhaps my daffodils are an improvement. For each of my years here I have planted a hundred or more daffodil bulbs, more or less randomly starting around the house and now planted along my 1/4 mile fronting on the county road. My previous owner and builder had done about the same thing. Now I'm watching the greens rising above the matted leaves and remaining snow (about 50% ground covered - more forecast). I've also lifted clumps of snowdrops (Galanthus), separated their tiny bulbs and replanted two patches of about a hundred, all of which are blossoming now as I write.

To fully reconcile everything, I would say that "improvement" is best left to the eye of the beholder. And, as usual, the onus should be on government/society, not the individual claiming a propriety interest.

While the status of your daffodils as an "improvement" may be debatable, the hours you invested adjusting the land to suit your taste is not.

I have no interest in stripping property from those situated like yourself. That being said, there is so much misappropriated property in this country (starting with land illegally seized from natives, to grants given by the king against any sort of principle, all the way up to abused eminent domain laws today) that it's impossible to declare that the mere possession of "title" has any correlation to the right to occupy or use land. Furthermore, as land which might have been taken by force hundreds of years ago might be legitimately improved or homesteaded today by the descendants of the original proprietor, history offers no basis for making any sort of determination of the legitimacy of a given land claim.

This all being the case, there are basically three options:

1. Leave everything alone.

2. Establish some principle other than holding of a present "title" as the prerequisite to maintaining propriety control over real property.

3. Go full [strike]retard[/strike] communist and eliminate all privately held property.


Option 2 to seems to be the only one which balances interest for a minimization of rights-violation.