Mises Institute Newsletter Editor Way Off on #BundyRanch

I’m not sure what’s going on here with Mises Institute Quarterly editor Ryan McMaken’s analysis of the status of the Bundy Ranch in Clark County, NV. In one breath he “dispute[s] that any state has the moral right to own land,” even “agree[ing] with those who want to see all government lands sold and privatized,” yet in the next breath seems to recognize the federal government’s right to own land in advocating that “[t]he feds … auction off the lands in question.” After all, how can one sell something without owning it in the first place? This leaves the reader wondering which position McMaken takes: does the federal government have a legitimate ownership right in property or not?

McMaken seems inclined to think it does. He thinks it would be “great … [i]f the Bundy family [could] come up with the capital to buy those lands” if the USFG were to auction them off. So according to McMaken, an aggressive, non-contractual seizure of privately owned lands is fine, as long as the victims of the seizure are able to acquire the capital necessary to pay the thieves who stole it in the first place. McMaken’s alternative proposal reads: “If they cannot [acquire the capital], [Bundy] will have to lease lands from the new private owners or sell the cattle to someone else with access to a lot more than 150 acres.” Is this McMaken’s so-called Libertarian way of thinking? If the victims of theft can’t afford to buy back their stolen property from the thieves, they ought to sell off other possessions, or else, live with it?

But his recognition of the federal government’s right to own property continues. McMaken argues that Bundy has no claim to the government lands his cattle graze on, since “[he] has unambiguously lost his case as far as federal law goes.” McMaken thinks “Bundy has already tacitly made it clear that he thinks the feds have a right to charge management fees, since he did it for many years before stopping twenty years ago.” As McMaken would have it, simply because individuals give in to the coercive demands of an illegitimate authority, only to later withdraw their consent, is an admission on the individual’s behalf of the legitimacy of that same authority!

Surely this is the polar opposite of the Rockwellian-Rothbardian analysis, which would view less and less payment to illegitimate, coercive entities as heroic, and certainly no acknowledgment of the entity’s legitimacy. McMaken thinks that “only the nature of the management is in dispute for Cliven, as is clear from the fact that he has paid fees in the past,” but the fact of previous payment to the BLM from Cliven demonstrates no such thing; rather, all that can be concluded is that somewhere down the line, Cliven chose to stop paying what McMaken himself views as an illegitimate agency the funds they demand, nothing more.

How McMaken can both identify the BLM’s seizure of Bundy’s property as morally wrong along with the illegitimacy of the BLM while simultaneously advocating that the Feds reap profit by selling the stolen land or cattle and that Bundy pay up to get his property back is evidence that not all Mises Institute affiliated individuals subscribe to the same libertarian philosophy. However, this particular variance from sound libertarian theory is riddled with contradictions, which is unfortunate to see given the immediacy and significance of the Bundy-BLM debacle.

McMaken’s blog post on The Circle Bastiat, the Mises Institute’s blog can be here