An Emphatic No to the “State Control” Land Grab

Every state handed public land sold it off. The “we’d manage it better” pitch is the same scam in a new suit.

There’s a pitch making the rounds again, and it sounds reasonable the way a lot of bad ideas sound reasonable. Washington is a poor manager. The people who live near the land would do it better. Give the states control.

You’ll hear it from a governor in a press release, from a senator on a Saturday morning, dressed up as common sense and states’ rights and local know-how. Utah has built a whole political brand on it. “Utah knows how to manage land well,” the governor says, and it lands as reasonable because nobody in the room asks the obvious question.

What happens to the land once the state gets control of it?

We don’t have to guess. The states already have a track record. They’ve held millions of acres of public land for over a century, granted to them at statehood for exactly this purpose. So before anyone calls them the better manager, look at what they did with what they already had.

They sold it.

We've made this argument in pieces over the last year. We traced the origins of the lie …