Property and War

There has been considerable concern in recent years, expressed by many members of Congress as well as the general public, about the growing imbalance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government. The executive branch seems increasingly willing to engage in acts of war without a formal declaration of war by Congress, as provided by the Constitution of the United States. The war in Kosovo was case in point. The president had committed the United States armed forces to an increasingly dangerous military conflict without a formal declaration of war. The power to declare war is expressly vested in Congress by our Constitution. How is it the executive branch is able to circumvent the approval of the representatives of the American people for making war? Many want an answer to this question.

The answer lies in understanding a fundamental difference between free societies and totalitarian societies. A free society is of necessity based on private ownership of property. In other words in a free society the people own the resource base; the land. All wealth derives from the land and by extension the sea. A free society is maintained on the principle that the people, not the government, own the wealth. A government of a people who own and control the wealth of the nation is a government which must come to the people for its operating budget. This funding of government projects is accomplished through taxation of the people’s wealth. A government which must come to the citizens for it’s operating budget is a government which must listen to what the citizens have to say.

The United States was founded on this very principle. When the common fund lands, those lands generally to the west of the original thirteen states and east of the Mississippi river, were conveyed to the federal government by the states after the revolutionary war, they were conveyed with strict restraints on their future disposition. Congress could only sell these lands to actual settlers. The proceeds from these sales could be used for only one purpose; to retire the revolutionary war debt. Congress was strictly prohibited by the articles of conveyance from retaining these lands as a federal asset or from using these lands as a collateral base to secure a perpetual debt.

The European bond holders who had financed the revolutionary war were generally in favor of a policy which would secure the debt by a mortgage on the western lands and resources of the new United States. This had been a practice of long standing in Europe. It gave European banks and financiers considerable control over the nations and peoples who’s lands and resources they had thus encumbered. A paramount concern of the people of the new nation, was to avoid being caught up in the political and military conflicts of Europe which were largely caused by nations borrowing against their land and natural resources to wage war. Bankers could finance both sides of a conflict. Whichever nation was victorious could find itself owing both debts plus interest on the debt. If the debt was not paid, the creditor had access to the wealth of natural resources which secured the debt. If a nation resisted the creditors access to its mines, timber, crop lands, grazing lands and fisheries, the creditor could finance another indebted nation to make war on the recalcitrant mortgage.

Under the European monarchist system, the king was the ultimate title holder of all land and resources. The individual subject controlled land or natural resources on conditional privilege from the crown. Consequently, if the crown determined to mortgage the land of a subject to finance a foreign venture or internal project, the subjects’ hold on the land could be lost if the crown defaulted on the debt.

The founders of the United States constitutional form of government were careful to create a system which would guard against control of our natural resource wealth by foreign interests. They created a system of government based on the principle of absolute private ownership of the resource base. This they felt was the best safeguard against the federal government ever gaining the power to act independently against the will of the people.

For the first ninety years of the United States existence, an effective effort was maintained to pay foreign debt rather than collateralize debt. This policy was made possible by an ever expanding frontier whose lands and resources could be sold to settlers and entrepreneurs. By the end of the civil war, two basic factors in the American equation had changed. Number one, the United States was faced with their largest external debt ever, and number two, the arid far western frontier consisted of a limited supply of lands which could be sold for revenue under the existing land disposal laws.

A policy formally begun in 1866, eventually evolved into a system of land disposal which was at once designed to allow collateralization of debt while preventing an actual occupation of the land by foreign or unwanted interests. The policy of split estate disposal of the West’s mineral lands allowed settlement of the surface of these vast regions of arid lands while retaining the mineral estate by the federal government for separate disposal under the mining laws. This system of land disposal not only made possible the collateralization of the outstanding debt, it also gave the federal government a source of revenue independent from direct taxes on the citizens of the United States. The age of United States imperialism with it’s attendant deficit spending had been born.

Throughout this period of transition in government policy from one of government land disposal to the current policy of federal land retention and confiscation, debt and deficit have grown correspondingly. Congress and the courts exercised considerable constraint on debt accumulation and private property confiscation for the sixty years following the civil war. Congress and the courts stopped the "India Plan" of the 1870’s, designed to collateralize transcontinental railroad debt with western grazing lands and water. Congress and the courts defeated essentially the same scheme marching under the name of reclamation, in 1890. The conservation movement, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accomplished the nationalization of vast areas of the West and Alaska’s natural resources in the form of national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, etc., but both Congress and the courts fought to protect private interests in these lands so nationalized.

By the nineteen sixties however, private property confiscation had come into its own under the banner of environmentalism. Ownership is defined as control of property rights. If government controls the use of property through regulation, then government, for all practical purposes, owns that property. What government owns it can mortgage. Today, resource agencies of the federal government have become the tools of the environmental movement. The environmental movement performs the function of transferring land and natural resources from private interests to government ownership and control under the guise of protecting the environment. The environmental movement is primarily funded by the same international financial interests who hold the major portion of the U.S. treasury debt.

Congress and the courts over the past thirty years have increasingly turned from their constitutional duty to protect the property of the citizens and have increasingly passed the laws and rendered the decisions which are making the wholesale plunder of the people’s property possible.

A totalitarian form of government is premised on government ownership of the wealth. If government owns or controls the land and natural resources, in contravention of private property, it controls the wealth. A government which has acquired sufficient collateral base to fund its own initiatives through borrowing against what once was the people’s property, no longer has to listen to what the people or the people’s elected representatives have to say; whether it be the war in Kosovo or any other matter.